Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­perville@guardian.co.tt

A new Rio Claro Fire Sta­tion is ex­pect­ed to be con­struct­ed on the site of the old fa­cil­i­ty be­fore the end of the cur­rent fis­cal year, ac­cord­ing to Fire Ser­vice As­so­ci­a­tion (FSA) pres­i­dent Keone Guy.

Guy said yes­ter­day that the project was among sev­er­al is­sues dis­cussed dur­ing a meet­ing on Tues­day with of­fi­cials from the Min­istry of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty.

The for­mer sta­tion was aban­doned on Sun­day fol­low­ing a se­ries of health and safe­ty con­cerns, in­clud­ing an in­ci­dent in which a clean­er re­port­ed­ly suf­fered in­juries af­ter her foot broke through de­te­ri­o­rat­ed wood­en floor­boards.

Guy said he met with Min­is­ter of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Roger Alexan­der and a per­ma­nent sec­re­tary, who in­di­cat­ed that fund­ing would be pro­vid­ed to de­mol­ish the ex­ist­ing struc­ture and con­struct a new fire sta­tion.

“From my un­der­stand­ing, the in­ten­tion is to have the re­con­struc­tion com­plet­ed with­in this fis­cal year. The Fire Ser­vice would cer­tain­ly be hap­py, as would the of­fi­cers and mem­bers of the com­mu­ni­ty,” Guy said.

“To­day, the per­ma­nent sec­re­tary did not in­di­cate the amount. How­ev­er, in a pre­vi­ous con­ver­sa­tion with the Chief Fire Of­fi­cer, he sug­gest­ed the cost was just un­der $2 mil­lion. Again, we are wait­ing to see ex­act­ly what fund­ing will be re­leased.”

As an in­ter­im mea­sure, fire­fight­ers as­signed to the Rio Claro Fire Sta­tion have since been re­lo­cat­ed to the aban­doned Un­em­ploy­ment Re­lief Pro­gramme build­ing on Tabaquite Road, a short dis­tance from the sta­tion.

Guy said the min­istry’s per­ma­nent sec­re­tary al­so as­sured him that fund­ing would be made avail­able to up­grade the tem­po­rary fa­cil­i­ty and bring it up to an ac­cept­able stan­dard.

He added that the Siparia and Mon Re­pos fire sta­tions were al­so in ur­gent need of main­te­nance.

Ac­cord­ing to Guy, he was in­formed that re­me­di­al works are al­so ex­pect­ed to be­gin soon at the Crown Point and Pi­ar­co fire sta­tions.

“Both sta­tions, we un­der­stand, have been ear­marked for ur­gent re­me­di­al work. The per­ma­nent sec­re­tary in­di­cat­ed that al­lo­ca­tions have been made for this fis­cal year, and we look for­ward to those projects get­ting un­der­way to im­prove con­di­tions for the of­fi­cers as­signed there,” he said.

Guy said dis­cus­sions al­so fo­cused on ben­e­fits for re­tired fire of­fi­cers suf­fer­ing from ill­ness­es that may be linked to their years of ser­vice. He urged the min­is­ter to con­sid­er grant­i­ng re­tired fire of­fi­cers ac­cess to the Po­lice Ser­vice’s med­ical fa­cil­i­ty.

At present, the fa­cil­i­ty is avail­able on­ly to ac­tive-du­ty po­lice and fire of­fi­cers.

At­tempts by Guardian Me­dia to ob­tain a com­ment from Alexan­der were un­suc­cess­ful up to press time.