The Tribune

WHEN the Nassau city dump erupted in massive flames on March 5, spewing thick black smoke for miles and setting a scene that from above looked like the island was on fire, no one could have predicted that what happened that day could have such far-reaching and long-lasting effects or that it could possibly swing an election and displace a government.

More than a week later, the public fury is as hot as the smouldering fumes.

Like the smoke and toxins, the daily anguish and concern for long-term health impact, the problems with the Nassau city dump linger. As they do, the message they impart is carried on an ill wind. There is trouble ahead for the Progressive Liberal Party and what appeared to be a beleaguered Free National Movement only 10 days earlier now has new energy and, presumably, financing.

Part of the reason for the shift is the treatment of victims of the fire. Residents who lived in nearby Jubilee Gardens, some of whom fled for their lives with little more than the clothes on their backs, are still displaced or facing homes sodden with ashes and dangerously scarred by potentially deadly carcinogens. Police and first responders who are guarding the area must be exhausted and we can only hope that they have been equipped with proper high-efficiency particulate arrestance (HEPA) filter breathing apparatus and are not relying on thin paper masks like the ones donned by painters.

But another part of the reason for the roiling anger is the rudeness with which it has been handled by those who have shown too little sympathy or sensitivity. The dump fire and its aftermath were the hot topic on a popular radio show last week during an interview with State Minister for the Bahamas Agricultural and Industrial Corporation and Member of Parliament Arnold Forbes. Even the host was stunned and speechless for a moment when the member of Cabinet said he wanted to switch the subject so they could talk about “something important”.

We wonder how the people sleeping at the Kendal G L Isaacs Gymnasium felt about the lack of importance of their fate. We also wonder why a group has not formed to bring legal action. Two respected medical professionals have expressed concern about the long-term impact on health. If what happened in an industrial section of Grand Bahama serves as a model, there is reason for concern. According to a very reliable source, 14 students out of 98 in the Class of 1982 have died, 12 of them diagnosed with cancer believed to be related to industrial pollution.

Every day, there are new twists and turns in the Nassau city dump saga. With elections only months away, the dump has become the glue holding a fractured FNM together and a blade that threatens to cut the reigning PLP from the office it so comfortably looked like it would retain only a few weeks before. People can argue that crime is not solely a government’s problem, that it is a community problem, a result of high unemployment and social ills or a reflection of loss of hope in general. But no one can argue that the dump is not a government problem.

It sits squarely on the sagging and tired shoulders of the present regime which came in with such promise. Waste management all over the world has political reverberations. When it has been mishandled for so many years, decades, and it explodes it is an occasion for finger-pointing not at all the governments and bad decisions that went before it, but at the government of the day.

That is especially evident in a case like this when the government of the day has had five years to confront the issues surrounding the dump and should have recognised the warning a year before when there was a similar fire the very same week.

The urgent issue now becomes finding a solution. While we hoped that the consortium of Bahamians who are in the business of waste management would be appointed to take control of the operation we are not averse to doing whatever it takes to transform the unsightly, horridly unhealthy dump into a proper landfill. There is precedent in Europe, where scarcity of land has caused need for compaction and conversion, and closer to home in the Turks and Caicos Islands where an American company transformed a dump very similar to Nassau’s into a landfill that is a tourist attraction. We are also reminded that in Grand Bahama, the landfill that is so clean it is said you can picnic on it is owned by a foreign entity but managed and operated entirely by Bahamians.

Caring enough about the people of The Bahamas is the first step to the solution. It cannot be having to fix the dump before Baha Mar comes on stream, as the Prime Minister has indicated, but because Bahamian lives matter. Throw the politics into the dump and pull together for a solution. Others have done it and they have succeeded.

Surely, if we are the best little country in the world, we can figure out a way to deal with our own garbage and trash. Then plant that model in the Family Islands, where the problem is repeated with far too much regularity, and we will see that no problem defies solution once the political will and public conviction is there to do it.