Fires are still burning in the Beetham Landfill, but Solid Waste Management Company Ltd (SWMCOL) chairman Nalini Sooklal says all the fires should be extinguished by Monday.Sooklal, along with Environment Minister Ganga Singh and the manager of the landfill, Richard Warren, spoke to the media yesterday after touring the site by helicopter.
Singh said he expected SWMCOL to select a proposal for alternative management of the country's waste by the end of the first quarter and expected that this proposal would be implemented by the end of this year.The landfill, which reopened yesterday, showed a significant decrease in smoke as compared to earlier this week, when thick toxic smoke billowed into the air and was blown towards the capital city.
Port-of-Spain had clear skies yesterday and the decreased clouds of smoke emanating from the landfill continued to be carried in a south-easterly direction by the wind.Warren, addressing the media, said 80 per cent of the fire had been put out but because the remaining area was on a slope, safety precautions dictated that fire officials should be cautious.
Sooklal said although SWMCOL had deployed all its available resources to battle the fire since Monday, after Thursday's Cabinet meeting additional equipment was deployed to speed up the work."We've had continuous action in the site, resulting in a clearer Port-of-Spain this morning. We have just completed an aerial view of the site. We are pleased with the progress we have made but we still have one area to tackle," Sooklal said.
She said because of the topography of the land it was difficult to extinguish the last fire. The final area is plagued by a fire burning beneath ground level and under mounds of garbage."The fire would have gone underground, and you cannot send equipment in crazy, because a tractor could sink into the fire and disappear. We have to be very cautious. We have done quite a lot and we have a little more to go again," Warren said.
Singh, whose role is to co-ordinate the activities of various agencies in order to extinguish the fire, said it was clear that it was necessary to have alternative means to deal with the amount of garbage brought to the landfill.He said 60 per cent of the country's garbage ended up at that particular site.In an interview, acting Prime Minister Prakash Ramadhar described extinguishing the fire as a top priority.
He also said: "We've asked for heightened level of security at all of the landfills because certainly we need to have security in place to ensure that this doesn't happen again."The future of the Port-of-Spain dump is a priority. The city cannot be vulnerable to a situation like this reoccurring."In a telephone interview Planning Minister Bhoe Tewarie said the Beetham smoke and fires had really given an opportunity to consider better options for garbage disposals.
"There are two opportunities. One is to have better technologically driven solutions to the problem of garbage disposal, and the other is to rethink Beetham and Sea Lots and what we might do in those areas that would be beneficial to those residents and the nation."Tewarie said he was aware that SWMCOL was in the process of engaging at least one company to see if a better solution to garbage disposal could be provided.
"My own sense is that SWMCOL is pursuing those discussions, although not much progress has been made."