Emergency Response / Rescue Services in kenya

Now following the freak accident and tragic death of Dr Wahome Gakuru, in all pictures circulating i haven’t seen any of paramedics / professional medical response / rescue personnel or even equipment; just bare handed civilians who most likely are not even trained in basic first aid care trying to pull out the injured with their hands and even pull apart the vehicle with their bare hands.
Dr @Luther12 and others; Police force @pamba and others, what is the situation / capacity of the country in terms of emergency response/rescue ?? Does it mean that even getting a minor accident on the road is a death sentence ??

#RIP GVN and the thousands of kenyans who loose their lives on our roads every day.[/USER]

Our rescue services are pathetic.
RIP governor

Actually, a lot of people involved in road accidents in Kenya die as a result of mishandling during rescue efforts.

Those people do not mean harm but are just kind hearted but have no clue about handling injured persons.

True but sad. It should perhaps be included in PAC drivers curriculum, first aid handling .

Wont help. Drivers are often the first victims.

Kwa ile strike ya doctors, they were calling for the establishment of a National Ambulance service to deal with cases like these. I don’t know what is the progress.

we rely too much on Kenya Red Cross

[ATTACH=full]137355[/ATTACH] They came much later

We must consider the cost, having an ambulance staffed with trained rescue crews lets say every 15km on a highway does not come cheap. I know places that have road tolls and this affords excellent safety systems on the road

exact location of accident: 0.962294 S, 37.104032 E

[ATTACH=full]137356[/ATTACH]

Maybe fellow drivers passing by. It’s sad that a lot of people don’t know basic first aid.

We don’t even have proper garbage trucks

[SIZE=5]This article by Boniface explains it all[/SIZE]

Chopper crash exposed our stupidity.

A helicopter with five people aboard went down in Lake Nakuru several days ago. What followed was disastrous, when a useless fishing boat was brought in from Naivasha to assist in the rescue mission, four hours after the crash.

It was one of several embarrassing actions that occurred on that fateful day. As one Anwar Saddat wrote on Facebook, the first respondents didn’t have the right gear and looked like they were digging for earthworms.

Lake Nakuru National Park is the most visited park in the country. It means that the lake, which plays host to millions of flamingos, is central to what happens in the park. For KWS not to have a single boat in the park is a monumental shame.

The ramshackle boat brought in from Naivasha wasn’t really there for a rescue, but to recover the bodies. They recovered nothing on the first day.

The Kenya Navy are headquartered in Mombasa and that’s about 70 minutes by air from Nakuru — and for them not to have sent divers within three hours of the incident demonstrates our clear lack of preparedness.

The real tragedy, though, is that it was not an isolated incident. In August, Mr Shekue Kahale lost 10 of his relatives after a boat capsized in Lamu. The currents carried away his wife, sister and aunt, but he somehow managed to hold onto the seven children that were on board and swam for over four hours as they waited to be rescued.

After more than seven hours of waiting, he watched in agony as, one by one, the children succumbed to fatigue as they slipped off the floater.

He ended up being the sole survivor. “I am sure my family could have been saved if there had been active marine patrols in the Indian Ocean at the time the accident occurred,” Kahale would later say during an interview.

The 2016-2017 budget allocated Sh264 billion for defence, National Intelligence Service and Interior Ministry. Yet even with that kind of budget, a combined search and recovery team comprising Kenya Navy, Kenya Police, Kenya Wildlife Service and Kenya Forest Service officers had to be assisted on the third day by a local farmer, Mr Luke Nightingale, who provided them with a map of the lake, two boats and divers.

Like every modern tragedy of our times, the media and Kenya Red Cross got to the scene of the accident before the rescue team. The young people in that chopper were working for the ruling party, meaning they were more privileged than most. This, however, did not guarantee a faster emergency response. That, right there, is a valuable lesson.

The unfortunate accident is also a lesson to all of us who keep saying the most hateful, divisive things in defence of our politicians. At the end of the day, in your time of need, you’re on your own. The politicians they worked for continued on with their day as if nothing had happened.

They hardly broke a stride as they continued running around the country looking for votes and could not even send a military chopper with divers immediately to join the search and rescue.

This article first appeared in my Nairobian column on 27th October.

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Soo sad.

Priorities in Life. We as kenyans are concerned in may things that dont help that we cannot make the basic and very important things come in first and handy.
May God help us.

The movie to this saga will premiere this Saturday @ prestige 7pm

Yet there’s always enough money for elections. It makes me ill that some megalomaniac wants a repeat election in 90 days, he wants to waste another 10+ billion which could be used to equip our health services!

That megalomaniac is not the one running government and he is not in charge of the health sector.