The six-aviation squad, presently working under cabinet division, has asked the Authority to pay its dues amounting to Rs0.5 million for using its helicopters, a source told Dawn on Thursday. The source said that the army aviation on the instruction of the then prime minister had used its helicopters for extinguishing a huge fire erupted on the Margalla Hills in 1999 when a national emergency was declared after the CDA staff failed to control the fire. The Centre and the NWFP government have recently evolved a joint strategy to tackle fire incidents on Margalla Hills wherein the use of helicopter have been declared necessary. In this connection the Capital Development Authority and the Frontier's forest department would launch a joint operation to control fire on the Hills. Fire breaks out every year on Margalla Hills, specially in summer, in which timber worth millions of rupees are destroyed.
Sometime fire continues for weeks.
An official of the CDA said as the authority was already facing shortage of technical fire controlling staff, the facility of helicopter was must to control the fire incidents. The official said they had two water tankers and four pick-up vans to meet any incident. Besides, we have sophisticated fire fighting equipments and sprays to extinguish fire.