'Discipline, not just speed' needed in Dorian clean-up

By YOURI KEMP

A Cabinet minister says Abaco’s post-Dorian clean-up “requires tremendous discipline and not merely speed” amid concerns that the effort needs to be “ramped up” to facilitate the island’s restoration.

Desmond Bannister, minister of works, told Tribune Business: “The Ministry’s efforts are planned, targeted, professional and precise. We began by clearing roads and repairing road breaches immediately after the storm. We did that with roads and bridges, as you can see with the Little Abaco bridge.

“The next step is to clear areas that require public access - road verges, government facilities and tracts such as the shanty towns that may impact public health or safety. However, this work requires tremendous discipline, not merely speed, since every attempt must be taken to recover bodies with dignity, and to protect property that is salvageable.”

Mr Bannister was responding after Ken Hutton, the Abaco Chamber of Commerce’s president, last week said the authorities needed to speed the clean-up process up by “a factor of four to five”, and permit foreign contractors with the necessary equipment to assist given that the scale of the devastation requires “mammoth resources that this country doesn’t possess”.

Warning that it was impossible for businesses and homeowners to rebuild “in the middle of debris field”, given the obvious dangers this posed, Mr Hutton said a non-governmental organisation’s (NGO) recent revelation that it was taking 180 loads to the Abaco landfill per day “needs to be closer to 1,000” if reconstruction is to soon begin in earnest.

He added that the debris and waste created by the category five storm, which a Cabinet minister previously estimated to weigh 1.5bn pounds, also needed to be properly separated rather than simply dumped en masse into the island’s landfill due to the heightened risk this posed for fires as well as long-term environmental and health hazards.

Mr Bannister, though, replied: “It is to be noted that contractors are not merely clearing the sites. Their contracts require them to sort the waste into several defined categories, all of which will be disposed of differently. That is tedious work that must be done very carefully. It is ongoing, as is mold remediation wherever necessary.

“The next step is to clear the island in zones. We are currently doing this. These contractors must be careful in relation to private property. Good intentions can lead to a considerable amount of liability.”

He also denied that there was insufficient capacity for the clean-up effort in The Bahamas, telling Tribune Business: “We are not close to exhausting existing manpower or equipment pools. Many contractors in New Providence are fully equipped and prepared to take work on in Abaco. The emphasis from the beginning, however, was to utilise local labour and equipment in the first instance until it is exhausted.”

However, Mr Hutton’s concerns over the pace of the clean-up initiative were backed by the Marsh Harbour/Spring City town council’s chairman, Roscoe Thompson. “I concur with Ken Hutton,” he said. “The CORE (international civil society/non-governmental organisation) is doing a lot of debris removal in Murphy and Dundas Towns. Marsh Harbour’s clean up is pretty stagnant. The only clean-up I’ve seen in that area is in The Mudd and The Peas.

“Why not focus on Dundas and Murphy Town. No one can live in The Mudd and The Peas because there is too much debris, and right now they are fencing those areas off. Why focus on where non-Bahamians live and you are forgetting the Bahamians in Dundas Town, Murphy Town, Marsh Harbour and Spring City?”

Mr Thompson also disputed the government’s assertion that Dorian-debris is being separated and sorted before being disposed of. “Right now nothing is being separated and they are now having fires at the landfill by Snake Cay,” he alleged.

“Two days ago it was set afire. It smells bad and the smoke is lingering. There is a company there that is pushing the debris. They are filling in an old waste area where there was water settled and putting fill in on top of it.”

Tribune Business also spoke to a Bahamian contractor in Abaco assisting with the clean-up and separating of debris material. Speaking on condition of anonymity, they said: “ The contractors are working; we can’t work as fast because of the human remains.

“The process of cleaning those initial areas requires a lot of manual labour and excavators. The debris is being sorted on site. The Environmental Health Department has two dump sites; one at Snake Cay that accepts the wood and the dirt, and another off of the Earnest Dean highway that accepts kitchen items. On that Earnest Dean site they have a separate on-site portion for just for metals and another for bedroom items.

“Then they are creating a third site for cars. It may take about two to three weeks before they create the new site from what I have been told. We have about seven more weeks before all of the contracts are to be done. It’s going to be optional to do extensions.”

The contractor also told Tribune Business “The issue in Murphy and Dundas Towns, and on the Bay Street, is land ownership. You can’t go on people’s private property and move stuff. This is the issue the government is trying to resolve right now so we can continue on into those areas.”