RESIDENTS of Uma Bakah, a Kenyah longhouse at Sg Asap in rural Sarawak, must be thankful for a couple of lucky breaks in the January 5 fire that razed only one block, according to the man who was at the forefront of the valiant effort to battle the fire.

The fire at the six-block longhouse left 15 families without a home in the settlement of people relocated by the construction of the Bakun hydroelectric dam.

“The first lucky break was I was hungry that day,” Tirah Liwan, the chief of a small group of firefighter volunteers, told The Malaysian Insight when recounting the afternoon fire that destroyed block F of the longhouse.

“I had unusually returned home from my farm that day because I was very hungry,” Tirah of Uma Daro Liling said.

Normally farmers like him in rural Sarawak carry packed food when they go to their farms which are often quite a distance from their longhouse.

“I was about to sit down to lunch when the phone rang. A fellow member of the local council, Ida Ibon, was at the end hysterically shouting ‘fire, fire at Uma Bakah’.

The 52 year-old father of four then went through the procedures he had been drilled in since he volunteered to be a firefighter seven years ago.

As his phone kept ringing alerting him of the fire, Tirah called up all 13 volunteers under his charge and after they had all gathered at the designated rally point, they rushed in two cars with all their equipment to Uma Bakah some six minutes away.

“I was first alerted at 2.15pm. By 2.17pm we were already on the way from Uma Daro Liling to Bakah.

“By 2.23pm we had reached Uma Bakah,” he said.

Tirah said if he had not returned home for lunch, their response time would have been much longer.

“They would have to find and fetch me at the farm and that would have taken up a lot of precious time,” he said.

When he reached Uma Bakah, he found a community in chaos with people helping affected residents move their belongings from the burning block while some were trying to fight the fire with buckets and garden hoses.

Tirah said his immediate priority was not to save the burning block but the adjacent five blocks.

“The fire was huge, fanned by a strong blustery wind.”

He said one-third of the block was already in ashes and the fire was raging uncontrollably.

To add to his woes, the two fire hydrants that were to serve the whole longhouse was 400 metres away.

Tirah said that meant that their limited 100-metre fire hoses were taken up to make the connection to get the water from the hydrant to the nozzle.

His battle plan was to prevent the adjacent blocks from catching fire by dousing them with water.

“We battled for one and a half hours before we brought the fire under control,” he said.

The second break the residents had, Tirah said, was that the wind was blowing the fire and thick black smoke away from the six blocks.

“If the wind was blowing in the opposite direction, there would have been nothing much we could do to save the longhouse.

“Deep in my heart, I was telling myself, ‘God is with us. He is helping us’.

“He is the 15th fireman. If the wind was not blowing in that direction, I can safely say the whole of Uma Bakah would have been totally burnt down.

“There’s no way my small group of volunteer firefighters and I could have done much.”

They were on their own.

The nearest fire station is at the Rajang River town of Belaga, a two-hour drive away.

The Belaga station dispatched one fire fighting vehicle and eight men to assist the volunteers but when they arrived, everything was over.

The station at the oil and gas town of Bintulu sent four officers in a utility four-wheel drive and they took five hours to make the 142km journey by road to Sg Asap.

Tirah said he is hoping more residents in this settlement become volunteer firefighters and they get more equipment to handle big fires like the one in Uma Bakah. –  January 14, 2023.