Firefighters a tap away
It's just a matter of a phone call and you could have saved many lives.
In most of the cases, panicky residents can't reach firefighters in time as they do not have phone numbers of fire stations during the inferno, causing huge damage to lives or properties.
Is there any way out of the situation?
“We started brainstorming on how to create a system which can relieve people of such dreadful situations within seconds,” said Sabrina Rashid Sheonty, a student of the water resources engineering department at Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (Buet).
FireCom is the brainchild of four friends from Buet and through the app anyone can get connected with the nearby fire station by just pressing a menu button of a smartphone.
Sabrina, SM Raiyan Chowdhury Akash, Rafid UL Islam and Kinjol Barua developed the app after a 36-hour effort at a competition titled “Bracathon”, organised by Brac on March 3 and 4.
A four-member team, led by Sabrina, won the contest in the fire response category at Brac Centre Inn in the capital.
The team leader comes up with a clear concept about the function of the app in a talk with this reporter on Buet campus one morning.
“There are mainly three reasons behind any major damage caused by fire. Firstly, we can't inform the fire service and nearby hospital timely and finally firefighting vehicles can't reach the spot in time due to traffic congestion,” said Sabrina.
“In such a situation, people can easily reach a fire control room, traffic control room and hospitals within seconds through our app by pressing its emergency button. As a result, firefighters of the nearby station will leave quickly, traffic police clear the road and the hospital authorities can send an ambulance as soon as possible.” Asked how the personnel of the fire control room and traffic control room can locate the place of occurrence, she said such a search system is also available in the app.
Rafid of computer science and engineering added, “We also made a hardware version of FireCom named Automatic Fire Control System (AFCS).”
If fire breaks out at midnight when everyone is in deep sleep, one will not be available to press the emergency button of the app during this situation. At that time, AFCS will inform fire service and traffic control room automatically after detecting smoke, he said.
The AFCS machine will be installed on the rooftop of a high-rise building and it will then detect smoke from every flat during any fire incident. For a 10-storey building it will need Tk 50,000 or Tk 55,000 to install the hardware, said Rafid. One can get the service at a cost of Tk 1,000 to Tk 1,500 and under the service, each family will get the smoke detector in their flats as well, he said.
“Brac will help us to implement the entire project,” said Sabrina, the winning team leader of Buet firefighters at the Bracathon contest.