And when the National Fire Service isn't busy with house fires, they're fighting off forest fires. As we told you last week, this fire season has been an exceptionally active one, with most of the blazes being man made. Usually, farmers ignite them during the hottest parts of the day, or hunters light them and leave them unmonitored. When this happens, they spiral out of control and threaten lives and property. The hanging smoke in the air also affects respiratory health.
And today the Station Supervisor, Kenneth Mortis, said that firefighters are overwhelmed with the number of calls they've been getting. He explained that in some cases, they aren't able to help because of the location of the fire, but they're planning to meet with stakeholders to figure out a better way forward.
Kenneth Mortis, Station Supervisor, NFS
"That situation has us on our P's and Q's, almost every week if I'm not exaggerating some structure of some shape is consumed by a bush fire and it leaves us the department to question, your direct choice of where you choose to live versus how can a bush fire consume your house. I mean, when we look at these open vegetation, for argument sake, they aren't anymore higher than waist high and if you listen to our safety advice, we keep telling you to help yourself before the help arrives, you are the help until the help arrives. Create that area of low cut around the perimeter or your house and once you do that, what you do is cut off the fuel for an oncoming bush fire, once there is no bush to consume the fire basically burns itself out. We're doing everything we possibly can to respond to these fires, mind you, we definitely are not in operation to respond to all so I think what's in store for us, we probably will have a sit-down with relevant agencies that might be in a more better position to assist us and I'm talking about the Forest Department, the Agriculture Department, see what we have in place to respond to these fires. We've been bombarded with calls as far as the Pine Ridge versus the outskirts of Rancho Dolores through the River Valley and those are just areas we can't respond to, it's not that we don't want to. We have to look at it on a standpoint whereby if I commit all of trucks to these out of reach areas then it leave the nearest responsibility vulnerable to any other such fires that may occur."
"An approximate figure within the Belize district, we roughly stand at a dozen structures that have been consumed by a bush fire."
