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Jakarta’s Fire and Rescue personnel lack hornet’s nest removal equipment
The East Jakarta Fire and Rescue Agency only has 6 special outfits for removing hornet's nests. It has handled 129 cases in six months.
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A firefighter removes a hornet's nest in this undated photo. (kompas.com/East Jakarta Fire and Rescue Agency)
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akarta’s fire and rescue teams do not have adequate equipment to remove hornet’s nests from the city’s buildings and homes.
The East Jakarta Fire and Rescue Agency for example only has six special outfits for removing hornet’s nests, which have to be used across 10 districts in the area and shared between 250 personnel.
The agency’s head Gatot Sulaiman said that the personnel had to remove a lot of hornet’s nests but were ill-equipped to do so.
“We only have six special outfits [for removing hornet’s nests], it’s not enough,” Gatot said on Saturday, kompas.com reported.
He said that in the past six months alone, his agency had to remove 129 hornet’s nests, with Cipayung District recording the highest with 31 cases.
“There are a lot of city forests in Cipayung, a lot of parks and gardens too. Hornets like to make nests in large trees and sometimes in old houses,” Gatot said.
He said that not all of the hornet’s nests were of the same size and not all of them could be easily removed.
“The biggest one that we had was more than 70 centimeters in diameter. While the hardest one to reach was the one in the middle of a TV parabola antenna on top of a house,” Gatot said.
Gatot said that the personnel had to face dangers when removing hornet’s nests because most of the hornet’s found were the tawon endhas (Vespa Affinis), which have killed seven people in Klaten, Central Java.
Gatot said that hornets were deadly when someone was stung by a horde of them. The person be unlikely to survive more than 24 hours.
He said that his personnel had to improvise because of the lack of equipment.
“We use the fire and rescue uniforms, common masks, as well as the fire jackets and fire trousers that we used to put out fires,” Gatot said.
He said the officers used duct tape on their fire jackets to close gaps on the neck, hip and wrist to prevent hornets getting in and stinging them. (ami)
