And while the smoke smothers the west - the heat wave is affecting classrooms countrywide.
There is only so much educators can do to ease the heat in the air cooled classrooms, which makes learning difficult. When we spoke with the Minister of education today about the complaints and the horrors of hot classrooms, he says that dismissing classes is out of the question. he explained why.
Francis Fonseca, Minister of Education
"Lots of things to help them but not shorten classes. We need our students in school, but what we've done is we've worked with the Ministry of Health to make sure that we put out advisories for the schools, that we make sure that we're sharing proper advice with the principals and teachers and managers so that they have guidance on how they can help to help their students to deal with the excessive heat. You're absolutely right we're dealing with excessive heat across the country. Obviously it's created many problems for us in terms of the areas where we've had fires in Toledo. In Toledo we've had to close schools on a number of days because of the smoke and fires. So in that case we do close schools. So yeah, it's an important issue but we continue to work with our managers and with the Ministry of Health to make sure that we're giving proper advice to our schools."
Coming up shortly we'll take you to the frontline of the fire in the Tapir Mountain Nature Reserve.
