It was Ms Shaffeek and Ms Collymore in a letter to this newspaper published on Friday who asked the question where the water was going to come from to fill the water cannon included among the purchases announced in the last budget. One presumes that the government is proposing expending $37M of taxpayers’ money on this quirky item for the purposes of riot control and not with a view to using it for extinguishing fires. At any rate, they have not said otherwise. As such one has to suppose that the Ministry of Home Affairs does not anticipate there will be any disturbances of a sufficiently violent nature requiring its deployment during the dry season, and especially not during El Niño. Turmoil on the streets, as far as the government is concerned, is seemingly only supposed to take place in rainy weather.
One wonders just how useful a water cannon would be to them if after it has exhausted its supply of, let us say, 2,000 gallons at one site, it is then summoned to another riotous assembly and cannot access any more water because the level in the trenches is too low and the river is too far.
Certainly they can’t be expecting to depend on the fire hydrants, since these have been mostly out of commission for years, and they have shown absolutely no enthusiasm for making them operational. All in all one has to say that this acquisition has the odour of a white elephant about it – unless, of course, the proposal is to buy more than one of these redundant machines. If so, then we may be looking at a whole parade of white elephants.
Practical considerations aside, the signatories to the letter cited above had more serious concerns. One of these was the fact that the government could expend so much money on water cannon when the fire service was starving for equipment. Well, the government would dispute that, of course. GINA has periodically announced the acquisition of various pieces of equipment for the Guyana Fire Service, including in October of last year when three water tenders, a water carrier and a Land Rover were handed over. In all for 2009, the public was told, the sum of $318M was allocated for the purchase of 17 fire-fighting items. Most recently, we published the contents of a GINA release on January 13 of this year, when it was reported that six water tenders had been added to the GFS fleet, at a cost of $60.9M.
Minister Rohee was also quoted by the state information agency last October as referring to the new fire stations at Bartica and Rose Hall. What the situation with the former is cannot be said, but the latter – as far as can be established – has no water tender, and when a major fire broke out there earlier this year, the fire-fighters and their engines had to be brought in from Albion and New Amsterdam. The fire began before 8am, and by the time the fire-fighters arrived at 9am it was too late to save the building. Whether any of this new equipment which GINA has listed is destined for Rose Hall, remains to be seen; after all, a brand new fire station is of little use without tenders and manpower.
While the purchases for the GFS may on the face of it sound impressive, it has to be remembered that Guyana is more urbanized than it used to be. The tinder-box of commercial Georgetown in particular, with its often wooden buildings crowded into limited space, could probably absorb everything – and more – the government has purchased so far for the fire department. In the meantime, there are greater concentrations of population in areas like Bartica and Rose Hall, mentioned above, as well in a whole welter of new housing schemes than was ever the case before. Even in the capital with its fire stations, quick response to a fire has often been an issue, far less in these new areas where no provisions for dealing with fires have been made.
And fires are more frequent these days, in part because of El Niño and the number of bush fires which the dry conditions have generated. However, it has to be said that the origins of last year’s 488 fires were various, and some of them may have been electrical. Until GPL can deliver a stable electricity supply on a continuous basis, there will certainly be no diminution in the (unknown) number of fires which have their provenance in power surges and the like. Whatever their cause, however, there has been an endless stream of complaints about the fire service’s ability to deal with fires.
In the end, of course, fire stations and equipment mean nothing if the GFS – like the water cannon – cannot source water. And we have been waiting for a decade and a half for this problem to be addressed. Both a former Fire Chief and the current one told this newspaper that tenders always arrive at fires with water; it is just that in most cases they do not have the capacity to extinguish a fire. In fact, the first mentioned, Mr Lawrence David, told this newspaper in 2008 that a tender holding 500 gallons will be emptied in one-and-a-half minutes at a fire, and at that stage most tenders were of this order. There were a few 2000 gallon tanks on tenders, he continued, but even these were inadequate to fight large fires. It would be the ultimate irony if the administration suddenly began work on the hydrants in order to be able to refill a water cannon tanker, rather than rehabilitate them for the use of fire tenders at the scene of major blazes.
In the light of the above, one wonders if the administration has given any thought to the public relations aspect of their decision, even supposing that there were some need for water cannon in the future – a highly arguable proposition – and even supposing there were no alternatives in terms of non-lethal weaponry – which is simply not the case. Perhaps it should be said, first of all, that water cannon used at very high pressure are not unassociated with injury, including internal injuries and even broken bones. That said, imagine a scenario (purely for the sake of argument) where a water cannon with a 2,000 gallon tank is used on demonstrators, and elsewhere fires break out (whether coincidentally or as a consequence of arson), and the fire service has to send its 500 gallon tenders to more than one fire scene – during a drought. It would not seem to the public a rational use of water resources at a time of trouble.
Water cannon are hardly used in the United States nowadays, because they fell into disrepute during the civil rights movement, when they were employed indiscriminately on marchers. It was those distressing images shown on television screens throughout the nation which gave water cannon an unsavoury reputation. They are similarly not normally used in the UK, although they were employed in Northern Ireland during the troubles – not a particularly glowing recommendation either. Since water cannon in some parts of the anglophone world carry baggage which has resonance here, what is the government doing associating itself with them? There is not a tradition of using them here, and however well-meaning the administration might be, inevitably they will be perceived as an instrument of suppressing legitimate protest.
The only possible reasonable justification for their use in our circumstances would be in violent street confrontations, and – again purely for the sake of argument – if such a situation were to arise, water cannon might not be the most efficacious way of dealing with it. Since we would probably be talking about Georgetown with its geometric lay-out, demonstrators could keep on the move (as they have done in the past), and one cannot think that a cumbersome vehicle carrying a water cannon would have the manoeuverability to respond with the rapidity required. One might have thought that tear gas might be more effective in such circumstances, and there is a long history of its use here. There is also the option of plastic bullets, although those too are not without their negative aspects, and may or may not be suitable for local conditions.
Finally, nothing will allay the suspicion that water cannon would be deployed in circumstances where it was not warranted, and would be placed on stand-by in the full view of peaceful demonstrators for the purposes of intimidation, if not actually used on them before it became necessary. All in all it is surely not the way to go for a supposedly democratic government in our situation.
