Loyse Vin­cent

Fire sta­tions in To­ba­go are be­ing flood­ed with calls to re­spond to nu­mer­ous bush fires across the is­land, says Di­vi­sion­al Fire Of­fi­cer for To­ba­go and Fire Coun­ty Con­trol Of­fi­cer David Joseph-Thomas.

This has re­sult­ed in ad­just­ments to the per­mis­si­ble burn­ing hours on the is­land, he told To­ba­go To­day. He said cur­rent dry at­mos­pher­ic con­di­tions and heavy winds are ide­al for the spread of wild­fires.

“For this week alone, every day we have been called out to at­tend to any­where be­tween eight and 15 bush fires at var­i­ous lo­ca­tions on the is­land.”

Joseph-Thomas said while in most cas­es the fires may not have been ma­li­cious­ly set, all the fires were re­lat­ed to hu­man ac­tiv­i­ty.

“A lev­el of con­scious­ness needs to come to the fore and per­sons need to un­der­stand the ef­fects their ac­tions have on their en­vi­ron­ment and them­selves,” he said.

Ac­cord­ing to Joseph-Thomas, bush fires cost the coun­try over $10 mil­lion an­nu­al­ly. The costs in­clude fire­fight­ing ser­vice and loss of prop­er­ty and be­long­ings – in­clud­ing live­stock and plants.

“When you add that to the cost of fu­el and man­pow­er and wa­ter when you make these re­spons­es to these in­stances, what we ex­pend to treat with these fires that could have been spent on some­thing else like health­care and so­cial ser­vice,” Joseph-Thomas said.

Joseph-Thomas said spe­cif­ic guide­lines have al­so been put in place to gov­ern pro­vi­sion­al fire per­mits in To­ba­go.

“In To­ba­go, per­mits will be is­sued for peo­ple to burn with­in the hours of 6 am and 8 am on­ly.”

He said the guide­line was im­ple­ment­ed as it is eas­i­er to no­tice if the fire spreads dur­ing this time of the day, as peo­ple are up and about. He urged peo­ple to be mind­ful of how they go about light­ing fires.

“If you must light get a per­mit be­cause it al­lows the fire guardian to come to your prop­er­ty, ad­vise you on when you should burn, ad­vise you on when to burn, al­low you to put the prop­er struc­tures in place if you are go­ing to burn,” Joseph-Thomas said.

He said once the guide­lines are fol­lowed, fire of­fi­cers will be able to put the nec­es­sary sup­pres­sion sys­tems in place to con­tain the fires.