Published On:Wednesday, October 07, 2009

Tribune Staff Reporter

mreynolds@tribunemedia.net

A MAJOR fire in Marsh Harbour’s Haitian shanty town “the Mud” has displaced at least 39 people whose homes were destroyed by the blaze early Monday morning.

Volunteer fire services struggled to drive six fire engines into the overcrowded ghetto in the heart of Marsh Harbour, Abaco, at around 5am as people and broken-down vehicles blocked the narrow dirt roads.

It took one and a half hours for about 14 firefighters to extinguish the blaze which started in one of the makeshift plywood homes and quickly spread to burn down 12 structures, including at least 19 homes.

Police are investigating the cause of the fire as residents recover from the trauma.

At least 39 legal Haitian and Haitian Bahamian residents of the Mud who lost their homes signed up for assistance social services on Monday, and it is believed many more people, who are living in the country illegally, were displaced by the blaze.

There have been no reported injuries or deaths as a result of the fire and a meeting was held between local pastors, police, social services and the Red Cross to face the aftermath on Monday.

Volunteer fire fighter Danny Sawyer said: “It wasn’t a very big area but there were four or five families living in one of the bigger buildings.”

Mr Sawyer said it was fortunate the fire took hold near the outskirts of the densely populated community as the biggest difficulty for fire fighters is accessing the burning buildings.

“If it had been deeper inside we probably wouldn’t have got to it,” Mr Sawyer said.

“There are so many homes in there and so many people, it’s so congested, people won’t get out of the way, the roads are very narrow, and they have so many derelict vehicles blocking the way, it takes a long time to get in there.

“Then we’ll have three to five hundred people there just looking at you and you can’t get anything accomplished.”

Significant fires strike in the Mud every few years, according to Radio Abaco host Silbert Mills, who said Monday’s blaze was one of the larger disasters.

Living conditions lend themselves to a serious threat of fires in the Mud as a network of exposed electrical wires run across the ground and from house to house to power several homes with one generator, or tap electricity from the Bahamas Electricity Corporation (BEC) supply on the edge of the settlement.

Mr Mills said: “These big fires will happen every couple of years and this was a big one.

“It’s just a very unfortunate situation in the Mud. If the authorities are going to allow them to stay there they should put some roads there, put some facilities in and more utilities for them.

“They have been there long enough, so if they have status they should have squatters rights, and they should be regularised and then put a stop to more building.”

The Mud and neighbouring Haitian shanty town Pigeon Pea is thought to house around 3,000 Haitian migrants and Haitian Bahamians on an area of land opposite the main port in Marsh Harbour and the local Department of Immigration.

The settlements were established around 30 years ago and have been growing without any imposed health and safety regulations.

Many residents have legal status to live and work in the Bahamas.

Random raids orchestrated by the Immigration Department with support from the Royal Bahamas Defence Force attempt to crackdown on the illegal population, but have been shrouded in complaints of brutality.

Residents of the Mud claimed families were separated and residents were beaten, threatened and robbed by officers in the last large-scale raid in July.

The Immigration Department denies the claims.