Fire Service introduces ranked fire certificates

The Ghana National Fire Service (GNFS) has introduced three categorized fire certificates as part of measures to ensure public fire safety in the country.

The certificates which have been classified into 3 groupings; the high risk ( rank A), medium risk (rank B) and low risk (rank C) will serve the purpose of classifying the various institutions and public premises nationwide into ranks depending on the level of hazard they are exposed to.

Addressing press men at the GNFS headquarters in Accra Tuesday, Chief Fire Officer Dr. Albert Brown Gaisie stated that the move is to enhance the grouping of various fire outbreaks across the country based on the risk factors involved. This will facilitate easy identification of the level of damage the company or institution stands to suffer in the event of any fires.

“This is as a result of the fact that maybe when you look at the hazards of a “kelewele” seller confined to a certain place, you may have to look at the low risk. Likewise when you look at industries that use class B, liquid fuel fires, that will also look at high, and then we will look at the medium within the context of some institutions that neither belong to low or high”, he said.

According to Dr. Gaisie, the new categorization is an upgrade of the preceding one which incorporated all three ranks into one certificate and had no security features, rendering it easily duplicable.

The new certificates he indicated will have distinct security features which will make it easily recognizable and differentiate it from the forged ones.

He added that the provisional fire certificates unlike previously will now be issued within a one-year period based on the risk categorization.