Call early or risk losing everything — NFA

Fijians waiting too long before calling for help are making it harder for firefighters to save their homes, the National Fire Authority says.

NFA chief executive officer Puamau Sowane has responded to public concerns about delayed fire truck response times, saying one of the biggest problems was that people called 910 — the NFA emergency number — too late.

"Normally, what we see is that when there is a fire, homeowners, the first initial thing that they do, they try to put it out themselves," Mr Sowane said. "And then they do everything that they could, but when it gets out of hand, then they start calling us."

He urged the public to call 910 immediately when a fire breaks out, and only then attempt to put it out.

"As soon as there is something, they call 910 first and then they start trying to put the fire out themselves."

Mr Sowane said NFA's target response time was five minutes, and that window was critical.

"Within that five minutes, we can contain the initial fires. More than five minutes, up to seven to ten minutes, it will be very hard for us to contain the fires because it has now reached its free stage of burning."

He also acknowledged that road conditions and obstacles along the way could slow response times, and said the authority continued to look at ways to improve.

"When members of the public raise concern on our response time, we take that into consideration and we re-look at strategic ways of how we can respond much better."