Owners of high-rises indifferent to fire checks

Damar Harsanto, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The Jakarta Fire Department said on Friday the managements of many high-rise buildings were often uncooperative when it came to regular checks of their fire safety systems and equipment.

"Many of them (the managements) are not cooperative and fail to respond to our requests to check their equipment, simply forgetting that such fire-safety checks are for their own good," fire chief Johnny Pangaribuan told The Jakarta Post.

Johnny said the department had 50 inspectors who sent notification letters for fire checks, but they often received no response from the buildings' managements.

"If they give an immediate response, most will only allow us to check the building's fire safety systems and fire equipment outside of working hours, preventing our personnel from working effectively," Johnny said.

He said that because of this uncooperative attitude, his men needed more than a week to inspect a high-rise.

Since 2000, fire inspection teams have checked less than 200 of the 510 high-rise buildings in the city, Johnny said.

Even if the fire department is given access to inspect the buildings, their managements often refuse to upgrade fire safety systems and equipment, citing the costs, Johnny said.

"We can reprimand them but we don't have the power to force them to abide by the standards required by the city bylaw," he said, adding that the City Department for Building Control and Management had the authority to impose administrative sanctions and the police the power to impose legal sanctions.

However, both administrative and legal proceedings take time and energy the fire department cannot afford to spend, he said.

"This has lead to the current situation where more than 40 percent of high-rise buildings managed both by the government and private owners have poorly maintained fire safety systems and equipment," he said.

Poor maintenance coupled with the owners' ignorance has left many buildings with fire safety systems that do not work at all or do not function properly, Johnny said.

"Given these conditions, I assure you that most high-rise buildings in the city are severely at risk of fire," Johnny said.

This situation is worsened by the fact that Jakarta has a poor water supply for fighting fires, Johnny said.

Jakarta has some 900 fire hydrants, 152 of which are in bad condition. That is far below the 20,000 fire hydrants needed by the city.

It was the lack of hydrants that helped the Tanah Abang market fire burn for more than four days last week, destroying some 2,420 kiosks.

"We grappled with that massive fire day and night but to no avail due to the lack of a water supply," Johnny said, recalling that his firefighters were forced to take water from hydrants far from the market because the hydrants near Tanah Abang were not functioning.

After working for five days to completely douse the fire, Johnny said Ishak Suleman, the head of the fire department's operations division, had to be treated at the hospital.

Two other firefighters fighting the Tanah Abang blaze were treated at the hospital for smoke inhalation.