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Saturday, July 26, 2025

Diego fires under control

by

20140503

Of­fice of Dis­as­ter Pre­pared­ness and Man­age­ment (ODPM) CEO Dr Stephen Ram­roop says the bush fires oc­cur­ring in T&T are a symp­tom of cli­mate change and drought and will re­sult in heavy flood­ing dur­ing the com­ing rainy sea­son."A heavy oc­cur­rence of bush fires will mean heavy flood­ing," said Ram­roop in an in­ter­view yes­ter­day.

The ODPM is func­tion­ing as part of the Na­tion­al Op­er­a­tions Cen­tre (NOC) and has been mon­i­tor­ing and co-or­di­nat­ing the re­sponse to the fires which rav­aged hill­sides in St Ann's, Mar­aval, Diego Mar­tin and more re­cent­ly Tu­na­puna.Ram­roop said he was not sur­prised by the bush fires."The re­al prob­lem we are ex­pect­ing is drought be­cause of cli­mate change and that means an in­creased sus­cep­ti­bil­i­ty to fires.

"Then, if bush fires clear out the veg­e­ta­tion on the hill­side, we will have prob­lems in the rainy sea­son with wash­ing away of the sur­face ma­te­r­i­al, land­slides and flood­ing."Ram­roop said, how­ev­er, that the Gov­ern­ment was prepar­ing for droughts."In the past three years the ODPM has in­creased emer­gency wa­ter sup­plies by 40 per cent. We have met with the En­vi­ron­ment Min­istry and the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty and are in dis­cus­sions for a Na­tion­al Emer­gency Wa­ter Man­age­ment pol­i­cy."

Nu­mer­ous in­ter­na­tion­al stud­ies have pre­dict­ed that the Caribbean re­gion would ex­pe­ri­ence in­creased flood­ing and droughts as an ef­fect of cli­mate change.For over a week, fire of­fi­cers have been bat­tling fires in hills of west Trinidad.Yes­ter­day, they said the fires were un­der con­trol.Deputy chief fire of­fi­cer Ro­dulf Bruce told the Guardian that the fires hap­pen­ing this year had not yet reached the lev­el of in­ten­si­ty as ex­pe­ri­enced in 2010 and in 1987.

Bruce, who has re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for the North­ern Di­vi­sion, said his of­fi­cers were work­ing hard to put out the fires."We have had a very ac­tive sea­son but 1987 and 2010 were re­al­ly a lot more hec­tic for fire of­fi­cers," Bruce said."We have the fire in St Ann's un­der con­trol."It has been put out and last­ed five days but we still see smoke com­ing from ar­eas in Diego Mar­tin."Bruce said fire of­fi­cers were on the ground deal­ing with the sit­u­a­tion.


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