Sascha Wil­son

Res­i­dents were fi­nal­ly able to take a breath of fresh air yes­ter­day morn­ing af­ter hav­ing to en­dure smoke from the For­res Park land­fill for more than a week.

“We are 100 per cent ex­tin­guished at this point in time,” as­sured Trinidad and To­ba­go Sol­id Waste Man­age­ment Com­pa­ny (SWM­COL) act­ing CEO Ria Ramdeen, who spoke to Guardian Me­dia at the land­fill in Clax­ton Bay on Mon­day.

Since a fire at the land­fill on Jan­u­ary 6, she said SWM­COL had been work­ing fever­ish­ly to elim­i­nate the smoke in a 6 am to 6 pm op­er­a­tion which in­volved nu­mer­ous trucks and oth­er equip­ment.

“Over the nine-day span in which we were push­ing cov­er ma­te­r­i­al on the site, I would es­ti­mate that we would have utilised about 1,700 truck loads of cov­er ma­te­r­i­al,” she said, adding, “As you can see, there is ba­si­cal­ly no smoke em­a­nat­ing from the site. If you look around, you will see ba­si­cal­ly we are in a much bet­ter sit­u­a­tion than we were.”

Pre­vi­ous­ly, there were com­plaints about the smoke af­fect­ing a pri­ma­ry school and an ear­ly child­hood cen­tre in the Spring­vale com­mu­ni­ty, but Ramdeen said she spoke to the prin­ci­pal as­sur­ing her that the sit­u­a­tion was un­der con­trol.

“I would have touched based with the prin­ci­pal at Spring­vale Hin­du Pri­ma­ry School last night alert­ing her of the ma­jor­i­ty of area has been cov­ered and there is bare­ly any smoke em­a­nat­ing from the site, so that they will be good to go in terms of school to­day but when we leave here we will be tak­ing a dri­ve through the com­mu­ni­ty as well as vis­it­ing the Spring­vale Pri­ma­ry School,” said Ramdeen.

When con­tact­ed, a res­i­dent con­firmed that for the first time in sev­er­al days, they were not af­fect­ed by smoke from the dump.

Ex­press­ing her re­lief and joy, the res­i­dent is, how­ev­er, pray­ing that there will be no re­oc­cur­rence.