Dessie Ellis (Dublin North West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I take the opportunity to speak about a couple of concerns of mine. One, in particular, relates to the ability of the fire services to tackle fires in high-rise buildings. There are nine habitable buildings in Dublin above 13 storeys. There is the Alto Vetro, a 16-storey residential complex on the west side of Grand Canal Dock which reaches a height of 51 m; the Capital Dock, which is a mixed-use building with a height of 79 m and 23 storeys; Liberty Hall, which is almost 60 m high and has 16 floors; and, in my constituency of Dublin North-West, the Metro Hotel in Ballymun which is 52 m high and has 15 floors.

Dublin Fire Brigade has ladders that can reach the fourth floor of any building. The fire service also acquired a 42 m turntable ladder appliance for all high-rise developments. I am aware that Dublin Fire Brigade trains all operational firefighters and officers to deal with a full range of incidents, including fires in tall and complex buildings. In general, fire appliances carry the same standard 10 m and 13.5 m ladders, which enable firefighters to reach the fourth floor of a building and are only really suitable for what would be termed regular housing stock.

Dublin Fire Brigade receives fire safety certificate applications for planning applications. For each, the applicant must show he or she is in compliance with regulations. The fire brigade can grant or refuse such applications. Should a fire occur in one of these high-rise buildings, the fire service strategy is principally to fight the fire from an internal protected stairwell and, where possible, using external resources. Clearly, the fire service will be constrained by the equipment that is available to it. It is the opinion of a number of fire service personnel that the Dublin Fire Brigade is neither equipped nor trained to deal with fires in such high-rise buildings. This is a real concern in the wake of the tragedy at Grenfell Tower in London and, closer to home, the devastating fire on the tenth and 13th floors of the Metro Hotel in Ballymun in March 2018.

The tallest ladders that the fire brigade have are 30 m. This only allows the fire brigade to rescue people trapped on the seventh or eighth floor. What is equally concerning is that, according to members of the service, Dublin Fire Brigade has only one set of equipment for tackling fires in high-rise buildings and this equipment is kept at the Tara Street station. The fire service needs to be able to react and adapt to this rapidly changing city and have the resources and equipment to tackle emergencies and fires in existing and proposed buildings and complexes. Experts have modelled responses by the fire service, and their models show it takes a fire brigade 20 minutes longer to begin to tackle blazes that break out at 20 storeys than those on the ground floor. If you live at the top of a high rise, you will have to wait at least another 20 minutes before you can be rescued or for the fire service to put out the fire in your apartment.

Tackling a fire in a high rise is a complex operation, from finding out where the fire is to who needs to be evacuated. Operationally, the fire service will need to have the apartment manager present and have access to all the keys for the building, and with the varying quality of the building and of the building materials in Dublin, the fire service has to work on the premise that it has to evacuate everyone from the building. This is a very challenging exercise, especially if there are people who are trapped more than eight floors up.

Another concern I have is the ability of emergency vehicles to access underground parking areas, for example, in shopping malls. This was graphically brought home to me on Friday last when I was in an underground car park in a local shopping centre in Finglas when there was a very serious accident. A woman who was badly injured was left lying on the ground in the car park for more than two hours. She was in severe pain from her injuries. I rang the emergency services a number of times to get both the police and the ambulance services there. It took the ambulance more than two hours to arrive and the police failed to turn up. From the conversation I had on the phone with the emergency services, it became clear many ambulances were tied up at the hospitals waiting to have their patients admitted but, because of the overcrowding at the emergency departments, they had to wait until space was freed up in the emergency department. As a consequence, people such as the injured person I spoke about had to wait a substantial amount of time before they could get to be seen. It is not acceptable that people should be left in this condition for such a long time. When the ambulance arrived, it could not access the underground car park. The personnel had to park outside and make their way, carrying their equipment through the shopping mall, to the injured party. This must be the case, I suspect, for some, if not many, other underground facilities.

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