Fires, facts and fallacies written by Chris Cork

Chirs Cork

News of the tanker inferno came to me early Sunday morning via Facebook, as half asleep I was feeling my way into the day. ‘Are you OK?’ people were asking. It took me a few minutes to get up to speed, tell my global friendship group that I and mine were fine and was then immersed in the horror.

Mass-casualty events of this nature happen from time to time — a quick Google seemed to suggest that most happen on the African continent. But this was almost literally on my doorstep and the
rumour and misinformation mill was quickly in gear. What mystified me — and to a degree still does — is that otherwise sensible people seemed unable to do the joined-up thinking that was the need of the hour.

So here goes. The police, and why did they not do more and quickly? The accident happened on a double-highway in early morning. To mount an effective cordon around the crash that was outside any potential blast radius would have taken around 300 police. And where are they all going to come from at the drop of a hat?

What about the fire engines? Ahmedpur East is around 30 miles from Bahawalpur as the crow flies. Google Earth. You try it. Even if appliances from Bahawalpur were on the road within minutes of the accident happening it would have taken a minimum of 40 minutes to get there considering they would have to get through the traffic jam the accident caused.

The hospitals then, and why no burns units ready to receive? Certainly the Bahawalpur Victoria Hospital (BVH) was on the ball and activated its mass casualty emergency plan. Yes, they really do have an emergency plan and yes it worked. How do I know? Relatives, Dear Reader, relatives who make up a significant part of the nursing cohort at BVH. All called in and all responded, as did doctors of all types many of them returning immediately from leave.

Burns units? Google is my friend again. The regional burns unit is at Multan and there are limited burns facilities at BVH. Google tells me that burns units even in the developed world are not set up for mass casualties, with a ten-bedded unit being considered large. They are expensive to set up and maintain and staff with specialists, and have relatively low occupancy rates. Any hospital would have been stretched to busting by the numbers that had to be treated last Sunday morning.

All right then what about those helicopters? Well what about them? How else are you going to casevac large numbers of injured from a remote site when roads in both directions are blocked? Thanks PakMil…great job.

Well then why did so many die? And where did they all come from so quickly? Phone clips were quickly in circulation, filmed before the tanker blew up. There was obviously a large crowd milling around. Really? How large? Well I counted them and got 276, but that was just for a single moment in time. And how did you do that if you were not there? I took a still from a clip, enlarged it and then did a simple head-count putting a dot on each head so that I did not double-count. Not exactly rocket science is it?

The commentariat was quickly in gear talking about how this dreadful accident was all caused by poverty, lack of education, bad standards of driving/vehicle maintenance, deprivation, ‘low levels of awareness’ whatever that is and even lower levels of understanding that volatile liquids tend to blow up catastrophically if ignited. The whole point of volatiles is that they ignite very quickly and easily. Everybody in that crowd knew exactly why they were there and had a basic understanding of the properties of the liquid they were scooping up for all they were worth. There was nobody in the crowd that did not know that petrol caught fire if exposed to a naked flame — or spark — or cigarette. Even the children knew that. They were all there for the purpose of opportunist theft. Free petrol.

When push came to shove a lot of people pulled out all the stops. For that at least we can be proud.