Af­ter Mon­day’s fiery protests in the cap­i­tal city, Trinidad and To­ba­go's Sol­id Waste Man­age­ment Com­pa­ny (SWM­COL) says that there is still smoke em­a­nat­ing from the tyre re­cy­cling fa­cil­i­ty in Sea Lots caus­ing con­cerns about air qual­i­ty. 

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia, SWM­COL’s Man­ag­er of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, Sales and Mar­ket­ing, Damien Man­swell, ex­pressed con­cern about the poor air con­tent fol­low­ing the in­ci­dent.  

He said, “The air qual­i­ty right now is not ad­verse, how­ev­er, we will still ask res­i­dents to pro­ceed with cau­tion, bear­ing in mind the ma­te­r­i­al that is burn­ing is tyres, so the is­sues you have sur­round­ing the burn­ing of tyres is a threat.”  

Man­swell re­vealed that along with air pol­lu­tion, a lot of the com­pa­ny’s equip­ment had been dam­aged be­yond re­pair.  

“Those dam­ages as we es­ti­mate right now is over 1.5 mil­lion dol­lars and count­ing but the dam­age that we had is re­al­ly un­for­tu­nate be­cause they did not on­ly dam­age the equip­ment, it al­so ham­pered our op­er­a­tions here,” he added.  

Due to this ex­ten­sive dam­age and loss of equip­ment, Man­swell re­vealed that the fa­cil­i­ty was not ex­pect­ed to be ready for use with­in the com­ing weeks.  

“This could take over a fort­night go­ing in­to three weeks be­fore we could get some sem­blance of op­er­at­ing” al­though this did not ac­count for the time nec­es­sary to re­place all the nec­es­sary equip­ment to be ful­ly func­tion­al.  

In the mean­time, the SWM­COL fa­cil­i­ty is out of use and all cus­tomers are be­ing di­rect­ed to the Beetham and For­res Park Land­fills. 

Re­porter: Am­bi­ka Ja­gas­sars­ingh