It is very dangerous to try and tackle fire from the direction it is coming from
By Yoweri Museveni
Countrymen, Countrywomen and the Bazzukulu.
Greetings to all of you.
Today, I observed the successful launching of a prototype of an African firefighting vehicle at Nakasongola.
This vehicle is a convergence of two ideas that have been part of my life.
The first idea, is the traditional way of putting out bushfire ( okuteera omuriro ogw’ekishugyi).
In suppressing bushfire, using appropriate tree branches (not too small not too heavy), you tackle the bushfire from the rear (okugureetwa aha mugongo).
The bushfire is always driven by the wind. If the wind is blowing from the East to the West, the fire will burn from the East to the West ( I.e the same direction as the wind).
It is very dangerous to try and tackle the fire from the direction it is burning towards (in this case from West to East).
The fire and the smoke can easily catch up with you and kill you (either by suffocation and blinding from the smoke or actually burning).
This is not to forget the snakes and other animals which will be running away from the fire in the direction it is heading which can be an danger to you, especially the snakes.
Whenever I watch people in Western countries fighting fire on the TV, I do not see any systematic pattern of abating this issue – the angle from which you attack the fire.
Hence, the first idea of this vehicle is the African idea of fighting the fire from the rear.
The second idea of this vehicle is from my military background of using tracked vehicles (those that move on chains rather than wheels – ebijegyere versus emipiira) which have good cross country mobility capacity (they can move through the bush, they don’t have to follow the roads), therefore, after consulting our engineers, we decided to convert a tracked military vehicle into a fire fighting vehicle by removing the guns and the turret and replacing them with a water tank with hoses for spraying water.
In our opinion, such a tracked vehicle (moving on chains) is better than aircrafts or vehicles which are moving on wheels and are, therefore, road bound.
The advantage for the tracked vehicles is that, if they are backed by other tracked water carriers, they can sustainably fight the fire without stopping unlike the aircrafts which must always go back to recharge.