KINGSTON, April 25, 2012 (IPS) - For more
than a week this past February, the city choked on the acrid smoke that
forced schools and business to close. It racked up millions of dollars in
lost production and an estimated 60 million dollars in firefighting costs as
the city tried to combat yet another fire at Kingston's Riverton city dump.
No one knows what toxins were released in
the early days of the fire, even though the fumes triggered health scares in
communities within a two-mile radius and, according to some, as far as the
old capital, Spanish Town.
Highlighting continued inadequacies in
emissions control and air quality monitoring, the fire led to renewed calls
for stricter air quality regulations, even as authorities have no plans to mitigate
increasing greenhouse gas emissions and little knowledge about the substances
Jamaicans breathe in each day.
People didn't learn the levels of emissions
until three days later, when the National Environment and Planning Agency
(NEPA) and the Ministry of Health (MOH) deployed monitoring devices to
measure air quality and emissions.
Their joint report noted, "The data
collected gives a reasonable indication of the impact and provides a good
baseline to make decisive actions and inform the public on the risk if an
event of this magnitude should reoccur."
NEPA's coordinator of air quality
management, Gary Campbell, confirmed that "analysis indicated the
presence of particulate matter at many times the levels to which humans
should be exposed".
According to Jamaica's second national
report to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC),
respiratory diseases were among the leading causes of hospitalisation and
death in 2005.
Health statistics also show that in 2008,
respiratory illnesses were the second most treated complaint in hospitals
across the island.
Pollution tied to climate change
Jamaica's need to reduce emissions and
control air pollution is crucial to its efforts to adapt to climate change
and its strategies to reduce greenhouse gases. Climate change is expected to
increase levels of respiratory diseases and exacerbate conditions that
contribute to them.
The report also listed fires at waste
disposal sites, leachate and emissions of methane as leading sources of pollution.
Head of the Office of Disaster Preparedness
and Emergency Management Ronald Jackson has recommended permanent closure of
the site, noting that Riverton has passed the five-year limit for landfill
operations.
"It is advice we have already given. We
have also suggested options that include waste-to-energy options; air quality
monitoring to know what is happening with the people who live near by and the
capping of the dump," he said.
Aside from Riverton, six other dump sites do
not meet international standards as landfills, and trash pickers often cause
fires by burning tyres and other material to salvage metals. It is reported
as well that extortionists sometimes set fires in a bid to create jobs out of
the need to extinguish the blaze.
Jamaica's inadequate trash collection system
means that only 70 to 75 percent of household garbage reaches the dumps.
There are no separate industrial dump sites.
With most of rural Jamaica lacking regular
garbage collection, estimates of garbage that is burnt, buried or improperly
disposed of fall between 191,000 and 228,787 tonnes each year.
Also contributing to emissions are farmers
who use fire to clear the land, the production of charcoal and the burning of
cane to facilitate reaping.
In Negril, fumes from cane fires and burning
peat are the bane of the resort town's idyllic setting because cane fires
coincide with the height of the tourist season, while peat fires smother the
town during the summer, the hottest time of the year.
Industrial emissions are also reportedly on
the rise. The UNFCC report noted increases in emissions from electricity
generation and that emissions should increase with the expected restart of
the bauxite and alumina industry.
Carbon dioxide emissions data show a steady
increase between 2000 and 2005, from 9,531 gig grams to 13,946 gig grams,
when there were between 381,776 and 501,985 motor vehicles on the island.
Data also show increases in particulates, nitrous oxide, sulphur dioxide and
methane levels.
Today motor vehicles number more than a
million.
Conflicting interests
"Unfortunately, there are no efforts to
manage air quality," Simone Williams, technical director at the Negril
Environmental Protection Trust (NEPT), told IPS.
Williams said that despite obvious increases
in the level of pollutants, Jamaica had no initiatives to mitigate greenhouse
gases, a view shared by the experts.
Peat fires, in addition to being "an
inconvenience", also affect "the hotel infrastructure (and)
people's health", Williams added. But recent work to restore the
wetlands will "significantly reduce the fires and emissions", he
said, "if not eliminate it".
But eliminating fires in the Morass, despite
its protected status, could prove challenging, as many farmers make their
living there, Damian Salmon, chairman of the Negril Chamber Of Commerce said.
"Restoring the wetlands would solve a
lot of Negril's problems including the loss of the beach, because the
ecosystems are interconnected, but we can't drown out the farmers. Many will
tell you that they have nowhere else to go," he noted.
All agree that air quality monitoring is
essential. But NEPA's CEO Peter Knight pointed to critical shortcomings in
the collection of solid waste and the urgent need for effective public
awareness programmes to drive home the negative effects of open burning.
The agency has already begun to plug the
holes in air quality regulations, which has no emissions standards for motor
vehicle and open burning.
At its drafting, the Natural Resources
Conservation Authority Ambient Air Quality Standards Regulations (2006) aimed
to use permits and licenses to control emissions from industrial
installations.
"We are revisiting the act and are
working with the relevant agencies. There are already draft motor vehicle
emissions standards," Campbell said. He added that the NEPA had not
negated its responsibility, but rather had sought to prevent overlapping
legislation by including only industrial emissions.
"NEPA is not responsible for the
monitoring of motor vehicle emissions," Knight elaborated. "That is
the responsibility of the Ministry of Transport. There are the Country Fires
Act under the Fire Brigade that covers open burning and the Public Health Act
under the Ministry of Health."
But environmentalists want to see stiffer
penalties for open burning. The fine of 2,000 Jamaican dollars and/or three
months in prison under the Fires Act are considered too lenient to deter
offenders.
Nevertheless, the findings after the
Riverton fire have prompted NEPA to recommend additional equipment and
monitoring for at least a year. The agency is also seeking funds to increase
its monitoring sites across the island.
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