The fire raged on for hours and threatened everything in its path. What was in its path is a multimillion-dollar incinerator plant and a more expensive operation next door, the BVI Electricity generating plant; Two national treasures.
It was unfortunate that BVIEC should have been threatened. After all, when the Government decided in the late eighties to move away from landfilling to incineration, it was BVIEC, under extreme pressure, that granted two acres of its land to Solid Waste Department (SWD) to set up the incinerator plant.
The payment under the signed lease was $100 per year. There were conditions, none of them fully met by SWD, and there was also a term limit but everyone knew that the lease would run, sine die.
Prior to incineration, SWD occupied a piece of swamp land in Pock Wood Pond. When that arrangement abruptly ended, the government was without a landfill site for no one wanted it in their back yard.
But the waste generated in BVI, now over 100 tonnes per day, had to go somewhere.
There was always a question of what would happen to the ash, especially the fly ash that contained a concentration of heavy metals. However, the furans and dioxins posed no concern as they are destroyed in the upper chamber temperature of over 1800 degrees Celsius.
In time, the government acquired a portion of property up hill, behind the incinerator plant where ash, white goods and non-combustible bulky waste were taken. Spontaneous combustion became an issue once all waste was diverted there.
Complaints from St John, USVI, were incessant. The CDC, it was rumored, was consulted. But it was not the first time in the history of the greater Virgin Islands that environmental issues negatively impacted health.
USVI may have forgotten how health and lives were threatened for decades in BVI, perhaps still so, by the testing on the US island of Vieques, Puerto Rico.
“From the 1940s until 2003, the US Navy used Vieques as a training ground for war, pummeling the island with bombs as it conducted military training operations.”
BVI still does not know if its preponderance of cancers, especially on the west end of Tortola, does not have its genesis in that era.
BVIEC deserved better. There was consistent communication directed to the Health Ministry about the deplorable conditions surrounding the incinerator plant; Vermin, stray animals, noxious smells and the eye watering dust.
To add insult to injury, BVIEC’s pleas fell on deaf ears trumped by the discourtesy of the absence of an acknowledgment.
For all the advantages it ushered in, the district system of representation robbed the Territory of looking after aspects of the infrastructure that affect and impact everyone.
Representatives are so fixated on proving their worth and providing petty contracts in the district that they have, largely, failed to support projects of a more national significance.
The entire sub region has now surpassed the Territory. BVI will not progress unless issues of national interest are placed higher on the agenda.
Had the fire last Saturday breached the fuel tanks and engulfed the electricity generation plant, darkness reminiscent of the post Hurricane Irma disaster, would have overshadowed the Territory, a reflection, perhaps, of its state of affairs in theatre.
That fire should be a wakeup call for the BVI to be unshackled itself from its deep-seated myopia in public policy and to focus on the essence of democracy; the greatest good for the greatest number.
Fridays remind us of the "first principle" of René Descartes' philosophy:
Cogito, ergo sum. (I think, therefore I am)
Happy Friday!