They had been burning for a month and raging for the past week but the news tonight is that the fires at the new and old Belize City dump sites have been extinguished. Government declared the fire a disaster last week and that’s when the National Emergency Management Organization swooped in and took control. Since Thursday night the old dumpsite had been inundated with 300,000 gallons of water per hour while teams from the Fire Department continued battling the smouldering heaps of garbage at the new site. But the great garbage fire of 09 is over and today NEMO handed back control of the dump over to the city council this afternoon. 7News was on the ground and above.
Keith Swift Reporting,
This is what the Belize City dump looked like a week ago from above – 50 acres of waste land under fire – belching plumes of toxic smoke. And this is what it looked like today – there was no smoke, no fire – and the view from above was somewhat picturesque when compared to last week. NEMO Minister Melvin Hulse says NEMO did what it had to do.
Hon. Melvin Hulse, Minister of NEMO
“We assigned the National Fire Service and the Fire Chief is over there and then they got designated an area to focus on that area. And then Cisco with his dredge being assisted by two bulldozers and an excavator, they focused
on where there was about 20 feet of garbage, they focused on that. The other area that was in a more accessible manner that could be handled then we brought in about twenty odd trucks and got in the private sector with bulldozer and excavators, tractovator, put in infrastructure, identified the hot spots over there and was able to cover them and compact them and extinguish the fire.”
George Lovell, CEO - Ministry of NEMO
“This is all part of leaving the area in a state where the City Council can now manage it in the event a fire reoccurs. We have now put in those roads, those grids that the Minister talked about that were once there and so we will now leave them with a dumpsite that can be manageable quite easy.”
And Hulse says it was mission accomplished which is why today he handed back control of the dumpsite to the City Council.
Hon. Melvin Hulse,
“You all are here so you can understand that at this stage there is no longer a disaster out here and the site is now being given back to City Council and they manage it. And so when we as NEMO, as the organization called NEMO, now hands it over, you all understand what is being handed over. You look around and you can see there is no more a disaster out here. If smoke comes up right now that is not a disaster, that is a problem.”
Keith Swift,
In hindsight then if NEMO had stepped in earlier, maybe the residents on Faber’s Road wouldn’t have endured a month of this smoke?
Hon. Melvin Hulse,
“In hindsight vision is 20-20. We cannot have NEMO appear to interfere in any portfolio or jurisdiction whether it is a big car pile-up on the road or a flood or a hurricane or something because if that is the case there many times when Forestry can say the Pine Ridge is burning and maybe that constitute as a disaster because a lot of smoke is covering Hattieville. So we need to be responsible and very practical.”
Phillip Willoughby, Councillor – Sanitation
“The operations from our mechanical equipments and putting in additional infrastructure will cost a hefty sum of money. So with re-regulating the dumpsite now, these fees will pay a substantial and a significant role in terms of running the operations here on the landfill now.”
NEMO is still tallying the cost. The City Council plans to more than double the staff it has currently working at the dump. Mayor Zenaida Moya-Flowers says her council isn’t sure what they are going to do with the approximately 20 acres of land that is known as the old dump. That is because she says they aren’t sure who owns it.
