ENVIRONMENT-TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO: Surviving the Bush Fire Season

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Wesley Gibbings

PORT OF SPAIN, Mar 24 1998 (IPS) - Thirty-six year old auto mechanic Benny Lall was seemingly having enough trouble with the hot weather of the annual “dry season” which runs from January to June.

But when fire took his small wooden house last week, he, his wife and their four children became the newest victims of a disturbing pattern of deliberately set bush fires.

Chief Fire Officer Lennox Alfred has dismissed the suggestion that the fires might be the result of the spontaneous combustion of extremely dry forests and has pointed to the extra burden being placed on the shoulders of his officers this season.

Senior sustainable development advisor to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) forestry expert, Carol James says there is no doubt that the fires are all man-made.

“People,” she says, “cause fires.”

She adds that forest fires have been having a devastating effect on the country’s bio-diversity and she suggests that it is a “people problem.”

Any project to address the problem of forest fires must involve “a change in culture”, she says.

Last year, there were 549 reported bush fires. This year, in the first three months of the dry season, there have already been 750 reported cases.

The annual phenomenon is now called the “bush fire season” by fire officers. For Lall and about half a dozen others throughout the country, it has become a season of destruction.

In one instance, so far, it has brought serious injury. In one remote area in the south of the island of Trinidad, a 14 year old boy stepped on a live electricity wire after a utility pole was felled by a bush fire near his school.

Forestry experts are also counting the island’s losses along the three main mountain ranges in the north, central and south of the boot-shaped island. One official told IPS the damage is being estimated in the hundreds of hectares.

Monkeys, iguanas, birds and a wide variety of tropical animals have been seen fleeing fire-struck areas along the usually lush forests of the island’s northern range and valuable timber is being lost by the thousands of dollars on a daily basis.

Meteorologist Robin Maharaj says El Nino, the phenomenon which surfaces in the eastern Pacific Ocean and rattles climate conditions around the globe, may have something to do with the very dry weather, but “I don’t believe it is the major cause.”

The major cause, many say, is the deliberate burning of forests by squatters and small farmers seeking an easy way to clear lands for development.

One government minister in the 1986-1991 National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR) government, Eden Shand, was relieved of his environment portfolio during the period when he suggested that the government take strong action against the people responsible for the fires.

The public utilities are now chanting the same mantra. The Trinidad and Tobago Electricity Commission (TTEC) has suffered heavy losses along with many commercial customers who have lost perishable stocks due to fallen utility poles.

The Water and Sewerage Authority, already beset by a low water supply, have been policing their pipelines in vulnerable areas and there are fears that the oil-bearing pipelines of the state petroleum industry might pose an added risk.

The state-owned Petroleum Company of Trinidad and Tobago (Petrotrin) has organised a seminar to “alert employees to the situation.”

Though the setting of forest fires is illegal there have so far been no arrests or convictions for the season.

Robyn Cross, an official of the Agriculture Ministry suggests there ought to be a massive mobilisation of communities against those who set fires.

“Perhaps this fire season is showing us we need to work with communities,” Cross says.

But many believe that in small squatter communities, both residential and farming, the problem is so pervasive there is little prospect of firm action against errant land-users.

Ironically, these people face the highest risk of being affected by their own actions when fires rage out of hand or when the rainy season brings mudslides to the bald landscape of the hillsides they occupy.

People like Lall and homeless families in the southern communities of Sainte Madeleine, Debe and Siparia have already paid a very heavy price.