By 2021, Dubai Civil Defence will have a 4-min response time

As many as 416 fire accidents were reported in Dubai in 2015.

The Dubai Civil Defence will respond to any fire incidents within four minutes by 2021, according to its future plans. The average response time to alerts last year was 9.17 minutes and with modernised equipment and techniques, the department plans to improve it to four minutes, said the chief of Dubai Civil Defence.
Speaking at the release of the annual evaluation report of Dubai Civil Defence, Major-General Rashid Thani Al Matrooshi, Commander-in-Chief of the Dubai Civil Defence, said the institutional performance indicators have shown that the Dubai civil Defence is improving its performance to achieve its strategic goals and objectives.
He said that the department had successfully handled 416 fire accidents last year and 91.8 per cent of them were minor accidents while 4.5 per cent were medium accidents. Injury rate in fire accidents in Dubai is 1.42 per 100,000 people.
"The civil defence responded to all calls received at the operations room within the specified time," said Maj.-Gen. Al Matrooshi. "The department has achieved 100 per cent transformation to smart and e-services and the number of people trained for fire fighting and evacuation has reached10,465 people per 100,000 population. The rate of Emiratisation has reached 82 per cent," he added.
Preventive measures
The chief of Dubai Civil Defence said the department has improved its performance in taking preventive measures. Safety equipment were installed in 65,774 buildings while electronic protection devices were installed in 56,921 buildings.
A total of 44,277 buildings were linked last year to the Civil Defence operations room through smart alarms as part of the smart alarm systems project. The project, which was implemented in 2008, has issued 6,729 warnings till the end of 2015, he said, adding that these included lift crashes and fire alerts.
The number of evacuation drills reached 757 and benefited 365,443 people while 528,206 students were benefitted from awareness programmes in schools.
The annual evaluation included the fire at the Address hotel, which was erupted on the New Year day.
amira@khaleejtimes.com

• Dubai