An en­vi­ron­men­tal­ist has warned the smoke com­ing from the Beetham land­fill for sev­er­al days is tox­ic. But the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty (EMA) yes­ter­day sug­gest­ed on­ly long-term mea­sures to ad­dress the prob­lem.

The EMA said man­age­ment of the land­fill fell un­der the ju­ris­dic­tion of the Sol­id Waste Man­age­ment Com­pa­ny Ltd (SWM­COL) which said yes­ter­day it would is­sue a re­lease to­day.

In a tele­phone in­ter­view yes­ter­day, en­vi­ron­men­tal­ist Stephen Broad­bridge said: "There is noth­ing safe about the fumes you smell com­ing from the Beetham."

Broad­bridge, who is one of the founders of the Tri­ni Eco-War­riors group and a di­rec­tor of Pa­pa Bois Con­ser­va­tion, said the thick, black smoke which could be seen blow­ing across the Beetham High­way con­tained cyanide gas and oth­er car­cino­genic (can­cer-caus­ing) pol­lu­tants.

He added: "Con­sid­er the fact that we are on­ly in­hal­ing this as we dri­ve past the Beetham. The peo­ple who re­side there are at se­ri­ous risk."If a study was ever con­duct­ed on the res­i­dents of the area, I imag­ine that their state of health would be very poor."

Cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ca­tions of­fi­cer for the EMA, Nicole Bachan, said the smoke and fumes from the Beetham site were of se­ri­ous con­cern to the EMA since the in­hala­tion of cer­tain gas­es might lead to crit­i­cal health-re­lat­ed prob­lems.

Bachan added: "The EMA is cur­rent­ly in the process of fi­nal­is­ing its air pol­lu­tion rules so that it can be bet­ter po­si­tioned to ef­fec­tive­ly ad­dress per­ti­nent mat­ters such as these."Be­fore any ac­tion can be tak­en to stop ac­tiv­i­ties at the dump, she said com­pre­hen­sive air-qual­i­ty test­ing must be done to de­ter­mine whether there was any threat to hu­man life.

Broad­bridge said he found it out­ra­geous that the pro­tec­tive ser­vices, as well as the EMA, were not mak­ing se­ri­ous ef­forts to stop the fires at the dump.He said: "We do not have land­fills in Trinidad, we have dumps. This is out­dat­ed and ir­re­spon­si­ble. We need to get with the times be­cause we are way be­hind the rest of the world."

Apart from the health risks posed by the burn­ing of plas­tics and alu­mini­um cans, he said, such acts were al­so waste­ful, since en­er­gy could be saved by re­cy­cling the items.If they could not be re­cy­cled in T&T, he said, they should be bun­dled and shipped to coun­tries with es­tab­lished re­cy­cling op­er­a­tions.

He al­so spoke of the habit of burn­ing tyres, an act which, he said, "will come back to haunt us" one day. Broad­bridge said last year, two mil­lion tyres were dis­posed of in T&T, ei­ther by dump­ing in the ocean or by burn­ing them.

He said tox­ic residue re­mained af­ter tyres were burned, so by do­ing that peo­ple were poi­son­ing them­selves.