Killers in our neighbourhoods

THE EDITOR: In a 2010 tribute to artist Dawn Scott, Edward M Gomez wrote of her in the Jamaica Observer that Scott “spoke out against open-air trash burning – especially of plastics and tyres – which releases deadly, cancer-causing dioxins that can contaminate whole neighbourhoods.”

In TT no one speaks out.

In Five Rivers, Arouca, a tyre repair business regularly burns tyres (about once a week) usually between 8 and 9 pm when residents are home and the air is still.

In a little alley in the area, a retiree collects the plastic trash that passersby drop as they pass through the alley and burns it, again at night when the air is still and the toxic smoke can best displace the air in my home, ignorant or uncaring that he is poisoning me, his neighbours, his daughter and his two young grandchildren who live with him.

The EMA does nothing to educate the people of this country about, or protect them against, these silent killers in our neighbourhoods that kill just as surely as the gun-toting bandits.

M EVERSLEY
, Arouca