Dear Editor,
I guess it started on Thursday night. At 2:00am I thought the house was on fire because it was full of smoke and I couldn’t breathe. So I got up to look around and it was the same “good news/bad news” situation. No, the house wasn’t on fire but yes, there were flames 200 feet high at the dump again along with the same billowing toxic deadly smoke that has been killing people for years.
I sealed the place up the best I can and headed back to bed. The next morning over coffee, I open the newspaper and there is the headline: “Experts Have New Program For The Dump” along with the ubiquitous picture taken the day before of a couple of politicians standing over the supposed expert with some magic machine that is telling him exactly what the chemical composition is of the gases that the dump is emitting that are causing the fires.
It would seem our dump gives off different toxic gasses than every other dump in the world does and that we need some experts to tell us that workers need breathing apparatus and “moon suits.” Money well spent, it seems, since their “New Program” apparently was to simply set the dump on fire again when they were done and let it burn unchecked for the next 12 hours.
On Saturday the headline in the paper was “31 major fires at dump to date” with only four BIG ones and I felt my blood pressure head into triple digits. By my count, there has been toxic smoke killing everybody nearby and making everybody else sick for at least 250 days since the storm and maybe more. The REALLY big fire of a few months ago burned out of control for a solid week and billowed smoke and fumes for 30 straight days all by itself.
At first it made me wonder what sort of delusional individual had performed that “31 fires” analysis, the implication being that a fire every 12 days or so really wasn’t that bad, but then I simply remembered how things work around here. Maybe they were talking about metric days or SXM government days or something.
The Thursday fire still blankets the area with deadly smoke as I write this three days later.
Now, I freely admit that I don’t understand the Government structure at all. On paper you have a population of about 55,000 people, are proud to call yourself a country and your politicians travel in motorcades of big black cars at high speed with police escort and screaming sirens as if they are the Kings and Queens and Emperors of the universe. For the size of Government and the pomp and circumstance you would think they were managing the EU or something. They call elections whenever they please and then spend the next four months arguing about who got elected to what and in the meantime people are dying. They travel the world over on extravagant budgets to attend meetings and conferences and yet come back and have to hire outside experts and consultants to tell them what to do because, apparently, the minister of such and such doesn’t actually have any qualifications or credentials to manage the portfolio that he has been assigned and can’t make any sort of qualitative decision.
The obvious irony about that is that even when the consultants and experts write these VERY expensive reports and conclusions, because the respective Ministers have no actual background, there is no one that can read the reports and understand whether they are valid or even based in reality.
A population of 55,000 just about qualifies as a “small town” in the U.S. Each small town like that will have an elected Mayor, a Town Council of local citizens and maybe a dedicated public works department. If the dump catches on fire, and after the fire department goes and puts it out the Mayor says, “Gee, we better not have that happen again or I’ll lose my job,” he gets the town council together who votes on an appropriation to hire the “Make Sure The Dump Never Catches On Fire Again Incorporated” company and in 30 days the check gets written, big trucks show up and guys that know what they are doing get out, and a system gets put in place that ensures that it never happens again.
Rule Number One in Engineering: “Any problem that can be solved with money isn’t a problem at all.” Look around – do you see the dumps burning continuously on Anguilla or St. Kitts or St. Barths or in the U.S. and Holland? No. Why? Simple. Because they don’t allow it to happen.
We don’t have the first dump in the world that ever caught fire. We just have a system that doesn’t CARE if it catches fire and makes the smoke and kills people.
The individuals running those OTHER jurisdictions actually care whether their citizens live or die. What do your Kings and Queens and Emperors in their motorcades here do? Well, there it was in the same newspaper as the fake expert and his magic gas-sniffing machine. The NEW hot-button issue is single-use plastic bags. Quick, stop the presses. Single-use plastic bags are now the single most important issue this island nation faces. Sarah says so, so it must be true. The dump is a mere inconvenience. Don’t worry about it any longer.
I had occasion to sit nearby a table at breakfast some weeks ago where two individuals were talking about a waste-to-energy system. Being an engineer, I listened “over their shoulder,” so to speak , and when they got up to leave I invited the primary speaker to join me. He did and I listened intently for an hour as he described the system. I won’t bore you with the technical details but simply say it wasn’t some space alien weirdo concept that had never been done before but was, in fact, a beautifully designed and executed, essentially conventional system that was already operating in a dozen countries for a long time with 100 per cent success. My new friend was part of a group that had traveled here to make the presentation and proposal to government.
“What happened?” I asked.
“The usual,” he said, “There wasn’t anyone at the meeting with any technical background to understand what was being said and in the end there needed to be some cash that changed hands before anything could be considered at all.”
In the conversation he was very careful not to say directly that he had been asked for money under the table, but the implication was crystal clear. It was going to be “pay to play” or there was no deal to be made no matter how good the system was or how simply it could solve the problem. His group wouldn’t pay so they got back on their plane and left. They flew through the dump smoke as they departed.
I wasn’t any more surprised to hear that than I was to wake up to a house full of toxic smoke on Thursday night. That’s what you get when you have a government that seems to have limitless authority to screw with you whenever they feel like it, yet, when it really counts, there is nobody actually in charge.
Quick, let’s hire some consultants and experts to explain that phenomenon. That would be a report I would really like to read.
Steven Johnson
