Dear Editor,
It is a major challenge to find words to adequately express my acute embarrassment as a Jamaican viewing our efforts to extinguish fires at Riverton and now Mavis Bank. To see fires burning for days on end, sending dangerous toxins into the air, curtailing businesses, and now causing severe damage to the coffee industry while drivers truck dirt, aircraft spray fast-evaporating water from above, and farmers use cutlasses to cut down bushes is a picture right out of the Dark Ages.
Do we not watch CNN to see how fires are put out in remote mountainous regions of California and British Columbia, where fire trucks cannot go? Firefighters use orange-coloured chemicals dropped from aircraft. That's how.
Had we spent even a fraction of what it has cost our health services, businesses and the coffee industry and created a massive stockpile of these chemicals we could have doused these fires in a fraction of the time it took. I guess it's far easier and more headline-grabbing to pillory Jennifer Edwards.
It is truly amazing that while we have been exposed through cable TV to everything going on in the wide world, we seem to have a proclivity for adopting as part of our lifestyle much that is negative from abroad while simply ignoring advances in methods and technology which could help lift us out of the poverty which has been our lot since Independence.
Errol W A Townshend
Ontario, Canada
ewat@rogers.com
We're practising firefighting from the Dark Ages
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It is a major challenge to find words to adequately express my acute embarrassment as a Jamaican viewing our efforts to extinguish fires at Riverton and now Mavis Bank. To see fires burning for days on end, sending dangerous toxins into the air, curtailing businesses, and now causing severe damage to the coffee industry while drivers truck dirt, aircraft spray fast-evaporating water from above, and farmers use cutlasses to cut down bushes is a picture right out of the Dark Ages.
Do we not watch CNN to see how fires are put out in remote mountainous regions of California and British Columbia, where fire trucks cannot go? Firefighters use orange-coloured chemicals dropped from aircraft. That's how.
Had we spent even a fraction of what it has cost our health services, businesses and the coffee industry and created a massive stockpile of these chemicals we could have doused these fires in a fraction of the time it took. I guess it's far easier and more headline-grabbing to pillory Jennifer Edwards.
It is truly amazing that while we have been exposed through cable TV to everything going on in the wide world, we seem to have a proclivity for adopting as part of our lifestyle much that is negative from abroad while simply ignoring advances in methods and technology which could help lift us out of the poverty which has been our lot since Independence.
Errol W A Townshend
Ontario, Canada
ewat@rogers.com
We're practising firefighting from the Dark Ages
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