“There's no harm in hoping for the best as long as you're prepared for the worst” ~ Stephen King
We started the second quarter of this year by shining the light on some public safety issues we face in Nigeria, in relation to emergency response. Using fire incidents as our emergency module and Lagos State as an area of study, we sort to find the current state of fire response in comparison with international standards and expectations. The results from Phase I to Phase IV analysis proved that less than 10% of the entire state meet these international expectations for responding to fire incidents - 8 minutes response time, meaning that almost 90% of the entire state is at risk if/when a fire incident occurs.
This led us to the main question - How do we ensure maximum coverage in the state, to be better prepared when situations like this arise?
The simple answer is - Build new fire service facilities at strategic locations within the state.
Some of the criterion that went into selecting these new locations are;
The result from this analysis shows that in order to achieve maximum coverage for 15 minutes in the Urban and Rural areas in the state, 18 fire stations needs to be constructed and strategic locations within the state. Subsequently, 25 new locations will need to be constructed in order to maximize fire incident response within 8 minutes in Rural and Urban areas in Lagos State.
Solutions Platform recommends that the government starts with constructing a few locations to meet the 15-minute response time and keep adding new locations with time, however focusing on a vision for 8-minute response time within the state and eventually the entire country.
Finally, we have created a story map that shows all the steps we took to achieve the Lagos State Emergency Response Model from Phase I to Phase IV:
Caveats Encountered during this Research
1. Currently, there are no traffic data for Nigerian roads from ArcGISOnline World Traffic Service - which uses dynamic traffic format (DTF) to create live traffic layers.
This creates some margin of error (MoE) for our proposed travel time for a fire truck to reach an incident location.
2. This model does not account for the quality of the equipment being used by these fire trucks.
This part depends solely on the government
3. There are currently no fire hydrants in any part of the country to assist the fire trucks when its tank is emptyIn developed countries, fire hydrants are within 50 - 400 feet of each structure depending on the district (residential or commercial)
