Between 16:40 and 16:45 on Sunday, December 17, 2006, an unknown arsonist started a blaze in a local cartier of Braşov, Romania.

Within minutes, residents from the block apartments began gathering to assess the danger and organize a hazard containment plan to protect their neighborhood. I heard the sounds outside and went to the porch to see what the commotion was about.

My first reaction was that the fire department should be called because the trash fire was rapidly growing into a full blaze directly next to a building whose contents might either be electrical or mechnical (think: oil, flammable materials). There were also cars parked nearby and a lot more trash on hand. Who could know how nasty things might get?

Using a cell phone to dial 112 (the equivalent of America’s 911), the call was answered by a dispatcher almost immediately. When she understood the nature of the emergency, the dispatcher took down name information and then quickly transfered the call to Braşov’s fire department.

Answering the phone around 16:51, the pompieri representative sounded as though he’d been awoken from a semi-sleep stupor induced by watching old Married With Children episodes. Half-heartedly, he asked if the fire was big. Well, let’s see, I don’t know what big means, but this is decent-sized and growing. It’s threatening a small building, additional trash bins, and some nearby cars.

The public safety official pretty much lost all interest. If it wasn’t big enough to cause screaming panic on the part of the caller, then the entire thing would probably resolve itself and burn out like a small campfire for roasting marshmallows. He seemed to fumble around for a pencil before lackadaisically going through the motions of asking for the location of the fire, whether anyone had been burned, et cetera.

He then advised to call again, if the fire got worse. Thanks for calling. Bye now.

Sure, I hadn’t really expected 18 ladders to appear from nowhere, but I had expected a professional fire department properly trained in modern public safety standards to send at least a single truck to the scene pretty much right away. To have a pompieri emergency operator basically yawn at reports of a fire, well, frankly, it brought questions about Romania’s fitness to join the European Union.

Fortunately, a few people living nearby were already carting buckets of water to and fro the neighborhood bar de zi to douse the flames.

Their action was a crucial tactic in the face of Braşov’s failure to send pompieri. There aren’t many ground-level water sources in the area from which to fill buckets and it seems no one owned a hose. But the guys managed to keep some water flowing toward the fire, like a line of ants each carrying a single drop.

It seemed to help at first, but the fire had struck gold and resurged with intensity as regular citizens inhaled the toxic smoke of burning plastic, rubber, and chemicals and literally walked on burning embers with tennis shoes trying to toss buckets of water on the heart of the blaze.

Between the bucket brigade, dirt shoveling residents, and an old man standing around to direct action at anyone who would listen, the untrained fire fighters waged a pitched battle for approximately 20 minutes before the fire reached a manageable state.

Without the help of paid city officials, they began dismantling burning objects from the fire with their bare hands and rolling each hot item in the dirt until the flames subsided. Then, they’d return again and again to repeat the process. Ironically smoking cigarettes all the while.

Men from the block apartments continued to watch the dying flames for some time thereafter, occasionally kicking dirt onto a nearby pile of burning trash or scooping out hot coals to dump in mud wet from snowmelt. With things seemingly under control, I began to lose interest like many others.

The remnants of the fire smouldered on.

In fact, later that night somewhere around 22:00, I began to smell strange fumes in my apartment. Going back to the porch, it was easy to see that the fire had re-started itself some hours later. I suspect it had managed to light a car tire, or something similar, on fire judging by the foul stench of the thick billowing plumes of deep black rising into the night sky.

The event leaves me to wonder whether it’s closer to the truth to say this is essentially a local problem between Braşov’s water supply and city mayor George Scripcaru, who is the ultimate executive in charge of fire department’s policy of not responding to legitimate emergency calls and thus directly exposing several of Braşov’s citizens to danger, or is this public service failure indicative of a wider problem across Romania where public safety officials just like Locotenet-colonel Ioan Rechitean (Inspector Şef of Braşov) and corresponding government politicians are wholly incapable of providing basic services to the citizens living within their jurisdiction whom pay the taxes for their income?

Prognosis is perhaps debatable. Prescription is obvious: change.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 29th, 2006 at 7:00 pm and is filed under Living, Politics, Society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.