Fires and supervision

Fires in public places haunt Indonesian urbanites because nobody -- certainly not the city administration -- has put forward a workable fire prevention plan. The hazard of a conflagration is not limited to slum areas, but can hit high-rise buildings and marketplaces. The number of casualties is appalling in many cases.

The latest tragedy, the March 29 fire in a Bogor shopping center, burned 10 department-store employees alive. A number of killer fires have been blamed on careless building owners, electrical short circuits, the inadequacy of fire prevention systems and the absence of decent fire escapes (forget helipads).

Free from any responsibility are the city officials in charge of regular supervision of fire prevention equipment in public buildings.

The city administration complains about the lack of the prevention equipment but does not punish violators. The building owners' stubbornness has made the city's fire inspectors reluctant to carry out their jobs. This is compounded by a lack of supervision, long the most notorious weakness of the bureaucracy.

The city public order office recently claimed it was too short of staff to check the safety of buildings used for entertainment activities. Their excuse flounders because they seem to have enough officers to regularly round up prostitutes and conduct brutal night raids on boarding houses to ferret out female workers or students who are suspected of not having a city identification card.

The infrequent safety inspections of high-rise buildings, marketplaces, entertainment halls, restaurants and factories is no longer just a demonstration of official indifference, but illustrates the administration's lack of respect for public safety.

The city administration is responsible for the supervision of fire prevention systems because it issues the building licenses in the first place. To get permits, building owners must deal with insufferably corrupt officials, a fact that even Jakarta Governor Surjadi Soedirdja has complained about. Some of the many required licenses are superfluous; the excess apparently stemming from the fact that the more licenses needed, the more opportunity officials have to impose illegal levies.

When a fire breaks out, however, the building owners, or their managers, are blamed for any deaths. Never has a city fire inspector or an official in charge of issuing licenses been brought to court for his carelessness.

The lack of responsibility stems from a lack of supervision and the indifference of fire victims and their families, usually poor people, who see any accident as the hand of fate. They tend to blame their families or themselves after tragedy hits.

The public is uncertain, or completely ignorant, of their legal right to sue negligent employers, building owners and the city administration for any damage to their property or any death in their family.

It is high time the government disciplined its fire inspectors by trying them in court for their irresponsibility. Establishing responsibility might deter further tragic carelessness.