PNP asks Gov’t whether landfill fires are based on arson or negligence
KINGSTON, Jamaica — Opposition Spokesperson on Local Government and Community Development, Noel Arscott, is asking the government to tell the country the true reasons for fires at several of the island’s dump facilities.
The National Solid Waste Management Authority (NSWMA) on Sunday reported that five disposal sites have been set ablaze in the past two months.
The affected landfills are Retirement in St James; Myersville, St Elizabeth; Hadden in Moneague, St Ann; Doctors Wood in Buff Bay, Portland; and Riverton, St Andrew.
Arscott, in a release today, charged that no real reasons for these outbreaks have been forthcoming, nor has the Government put forward a plan to mitigate them.
He cited “the lack of an imminent plan after repeated and broad based out breaks” as one reason for asking: “Are the Garbage Dump Land Fill Fires that of Arson, Negligence or Deliberate?”
The PNP spokesman also raised concern about what he said is seemingly a discontinuation of the mitigation measures started under the previous Government and called on Local Government Minister, Desmond McKenzie, to tell the nation if the International Landfill Management Protocol has been abandoned.
He also suggested that if the Riverton Dump fires were a result of total mismanagement by the NSWMA, then the chairman and the board would have failed and are for that reason culpable.
Arscott said the Opposition is apprehensive about what looks like a ‘free for all’ at the Riverton facility and is calling for the instant but temporary return of the JDF until the previously planned security system is put in place and also for the immediate deployment of drones as were previously intended.
“Nothing but a complete return to the professional management systems that include the 2015 Fire Suppression System implemented by the previous government, is going to effectively address the return of a problem which was previously brought under control, unless there are other motives at play,” the former minister said.
Meanwhile, he expressed that the Buff Bay garbage landfill is cause for particular concern of possibly deliberate acts of arson, “as while we are in the dry and hot season, the now rate of fires suggests something more than the custom and the lack of preventative action belies normalcy”.
The Opposition is petitioning the Government to fast track plans to relocate this facility to a location that can be secured, so as to save tax payers further millions going into suppressing the new growing rate of fires at the west Portland location.