An overhaul of the country's fire service over the next two years will see "significant improvement" in firefighter safety and response to incidents, a conference in Kerry heard yesterday.
The changes will see the first risk-profiles being set out per station area, and will see firefighters taking on the role of "ambassadors of safety" after crises.
The Siptu full-time fire brigade conference under the theme Civil Protection for the 21st Century was told that currently there are no fire-cover standards and vast differences in work practice and equipment in the country's 220 fire stations.
Tony McDonnell, Dublin Fire Brigade convenor, said the response to incidents was on "an ad hoc basis". Even equipment was not based on population.
He said Blanchardstown fire station, whose area included the Connolly hospital as well as a major chemical storage facility, had just one fire appliance. The next back-up station was at Phibsboro.
Minister of State at the Department of the Environment Batt O'Keeffe said many authorities had been putting various recommendations into practice "but without the kind of consistency from authority to authority we would like".
State Pathologist Prof Marie Cassidy talked about mass emergency situations.
"The problem with most disasters is that people often forget what to do with the dead."
She said each death had to be treated like a murder, and the same processes had to be undertaken.
"You are supposed to inform the coroner immediately there is a major disaster," she told delegates.
Individual postmortems as well as identification had to be carried out. Lifting bodies was hard physical work and especially on a mass scale.
"Dead people are labour intensive; you need two men for every dead man," she said.