The Trinidad and To­ba­go Sol­id Waste Man­age­ment Com­pa­ny Ltd (SWM­COL) has ad­vised all re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tions, neigh­bour­ing com­mu­ni­ties and the gen­er­al pub­lic that the Gua­napo Land­fill in Ari­ma will be closed un­til fur­ther no­tice. The clo­sure has come about fol­low­ing a fire that be­gan last Thurs­day and which is present­ly be­ing brought un­der con­trol.

All af­fect­ed re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tions, com­mer­cial haulers, and oth­er site users are re­quest­ed to utilise al­ter­na­tive waste dis­pos­al fa­cil­i­ties at Beetham Es­tate and For­res Park, Clax­ton Bay, un­til fur­ther no­tice. In a me­dia re­lease yes­ter­day, SWM­COL sought to as­sure the pub­lic that their In­te­grat­ed Waste Sys­tems and Op­er­a­tions Di­vi­sions are joint­ly lead­ing the ef­fort to bring the fire ful­ly un­der con­trol through con­stant mon­i­tor­ing and the ap­pli­ca­tion of the best avail­able mit­i­ga­tion mea­sures.

"We wish to as­sure all stake­hold­ers that they would be prompt­ly no­ti­fied when the sit­u­a­tion has im­proved and the site is re­opened," SWM­COL stat­ed. "SWM­COL apol­o­gis­es for any in­con­ve­nience caused by the tem­po­rary clo­sure of the land­fill but these mea­sures are nec­es­sary to pro­tect the health and safe­ty of vis­i­tors to the site.

"SWM­COL al­so ex­tends sin­cere apolo­gies to the neigh­bour­ing com­mu­ni­ties af­fect­ed by the fire and re­it­er­ate that we are do­ing every­thing in our pow­er to ex­tin­guish the fire," the com­pa­ny stat­ed. SWM­COL urged any­one with knowl­edge of the cause of the fire to con­tact the Ari­ma po­lice.