Kali­fa Clyne

En­vi­ron­ment and Wa­ter Re­sources Min­is­ter Gan­ga Singh says Sun­day's fire at the Beetham land­fill was de­lib­er­ate­ly set.He said that in a brief in­ter­view with re­porters dur­ing yes­ter­day's teabreak in the Sen­ate sit­ting.Fire was seen at the land­fill short­ly af­ter 3 pm on Sun­day, de­spite in­creased se­cu­ri­ty fol­low­ing sev­er­al si­mul­ta­ne­ous fires there in Jan­u­ary.

"My un­der­stand­ing is that once more the fires were de­lib­er­ate­ly set," he in­sist­ed, with­out elab­o­rat­ing on ev­i­dence to sup­port the claim, and stressed that such a sit­u­a­tion could not be al­lowed to con­tin­ue.Singh again said there must be "a dif­fer­ent man­age­ment sys­tem at the land­fill site.There is too much of a lais­sez-faire ap­proach tak­en there."

He said it was the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of the Sol­id Waste Man­age­ment Com­pa­ny (SWM­COL) "to do things quite dif­fer­ent­ly," and point­ed out there were sig­nif­i­cant se­cu­ri­ty is­sues as­so­ci­at­ed with the peo­ple who scav­enge for a liv­ing on the site.He said the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty had done air pol­lu­tion tests and re­sults showed that "there were no lev­els of pol­lu­tants that could im­pact neg­a­tive­ly on peo­ple.

At the dump site yes­ter­day there were small pock­ets where fires con­tin­ue to burn. The Na­tion­al Op­er­a­tions Cen­tre (NOC) and the Sol­id Waste Man­age­ment Com­pa­ny Ltd (SWM­COL) say the sit­u­a­tion is un­der con­trol.Di­rec­tor of the NOC Garvin Heer­ah said yes­ter­day the fires were un­der the con­trol and man­age­ment of the Fire Ser­vices and SWM­COL.De­spite as­sur­ances from both Heer­ah and SWM­COL com­mu­ni­ca­tions man­ag­er George Elias, thick smoke blew in­to Port-of-Spain sev­er­al times dur­ing the day yes­ter­day.

Heer­ah said the agen­cies work­ing to­geth­er on the Beetham land­fill fires had not yet de­ter­mined the cause but were as­sess­ing a va­ri­ety of dy­nam­ics.He said a re­port on the se­cu­ri­ty of the area and in­ves­ti­ga­tions in­to the cause of the fires should be ready on Fri­day.Heer­ah added: "The in­ves­ti­ga­tions are con­tin­u­ing and based on an in­ter-agency ap­proach they will re­port to the NOC as we con­tin­ue to mon­i­tor the sit­u­a­tion.

"We are try­ing to rec­ti­fy unau­tho­rised ac­cess to the land­fill to have con­trol over unau­tho­rised or il­le­gal ac­tiv­i­ties."The agen­cies in­ves­ti­gat­ing are look­ing at com­bustibles that were lit. They could have been lit from an ex­ter­nal source or from burn­ing of met­al to get cop­per."Scav­engers fre­quent­ly try to re­trieve cop­per and oth­er re­cy­clables from the waste left at the dump dai­ly.Heer­ah said in­ves­ti­gat­ing agents had dis­cov­ered naked flames that were lit by unau­tho­rised in­di­vid­u­als.

He said the NOC was tak­ing the lead on joint dis­cus­sions to as­sess the risk, threat and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty of the Beetham land­fill.

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SWM­COL: Progress against fire

In a re­lease yes­ter­day, Elias said sig­nif­i­cant progress had been made with re­spect to the fires which were first de­tect­ed last Sun­day."At present, work con­tin­ues apace and the blaze is ex­pect­ed to be ful­ly ex­tin­guished over the next 12 to 18 hours," Elias wrote.He said the on-site team had re­port­ed lit­tle to ze­ro chance of re-ig­ni­tion or spread be­yond the area af­fect­ed.While Elias had pre­vi­ous­ly said the land­fill would re­open to­day, the re­lease said it would re­main closed to the gen­er­al pub­lic un­til fur­ther no­tice.