Rashan­da Mc Ken­na

The blaz­ing in­fer­no that was the Gua­napo Land­fill in Ari­ma, which posed se­ri­ous threats to the sur­round­ing vil­lages for the past week is fi­nal­ly be­ing sta­bilised. Gen­er­al Earth Movers (GEM) Lim­it­ed has been sub­con­tract­ed by SWM­COL to man­age the sit­u­a­tion.

A work­man at the site, who de­clined to be named, stat­ed that In­te­grat­ed Waste Man­age­ment Sys­tems, the com­pa­ny that runs the fa­cil­i­ty on be­half of state-owned Sol­id Waste Man­age­ment Com­pa­ny (SWM­COL), con­tact­ed the com­pa­ny on Fri­day af­ter­noon. He not­ed that GEM sup­plied dirt and equip­ment which would be used to con­trol the fire.

Back­fill­ing the earth where the fire has rav­aged, is sched­uled to be com­plet­ed with­in the next 72 hours. The work­man said that 20,000 yards of dirt are re­quired to com­plete the ex­er­cise, and there is al­ready 8,000 yards on the com­pound. Al­though the dump is cur­rent­ly closed, all of the work­ers are be­ing used for the dam­age con­trol ex­er­cise.

Up to yes­ter­day af­ter­noon, a thick cloud of smoke was still vis­i­ble over the land­fill, with a few vis­i­ble in­flamed patch­es. Vil­lagers have gone back to their dai­ly rou­tine of col­lect­ing scrap met­al for re­sale. How­ev­er, most of them raised con­cerns about the lev­el of haz­ardous fumes be­ing emit­ted from the waste site.

Mean­while, au­thor­i­ties at SWM­COL have said the main con­cern was to get the fire un­der con­trol and af­ter such time the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty would be con­tact­ed.