Poor roads, equipment shortage make firefighting more difficult in rural areas

“We have only three fire trucks in the entire Ilam district and they are deployed whenever there is a fire incident. But on Friday the fire trucks could not reach the site on time due to poor road conditions and when they reached the site everything had been gutted already,” said Khadka.

In most of the fire-related incidents, local police and local people deal with it by using locally available resources like water, mud and tree branches as many of the places are not accessible to fire trucks, he added.

In Nepal, incidents related to wildfire and fire are very common which destroy property worth millions and kill dozens of people every year.

Despite their annual occurrences and increasing losses, successive governments have not paid adequate attention to the management of fire incidents.

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