Mark Bas­sant

Rag­ing bush fires spread­ing down the North­ern Range near the Teteron Bar­racks in Ch­aguara­mas for al­most two days, have threat­ened to de­stroy am­mu­ni­tion stores and oth­er build­ings on the base.

Sev­er­al fire of­fi­cers from the Wright­son Road, Wood­brook and Four Roads fire sta­tions spent sev­er­al hours yes­ter­day try­ing to con­trol the bush fires with the help of the T&T Reg­i­ment as well as the T&T Air Guard and the T&T Coast Guard.

Chief fire of­fi­cer Mar­lon Smith who al­so vis­it­ed the Teteron Bar­racks base to as­sess the sit­u­a­tion short­ly af­ter mid­day and told Guardian Me­dia, “There are large ar­eas of the hills un­der fire and there are sev­er­al at­tempts to con­trol them. Some of the fires have ap­proached the am­mu­ni­tion stores and oth­er crit­i­cal struc­tures which we were able to pro­tect,” he ex­plained.

Smith said that based on the in­for­ma­tion he had ob­tained, the bush fires have been rav­aging the hills since Mon­day and they were called for as­sis­tance short­ly af­ter 10 am yes­ter­day.

Smith said they were mon­i­tor­ing oth­er ac­tive bush fires that were high­er up in the hills that could not be eas­i­ly ac­cessed by fire­fight­ers. Guardian Me­dia wit­nessed at least five fire ve­hi­cles en­ter­ing the Teteron base around 12.30 pm.

Iron­i­cal­ly, 32 years and three days ago on April 26, 1988, a bush fire in the vicin­i­ty of Camp Omega in Ch­aguara­mas spread to the near­by Camp Omega arms and am­mu­ni­tion bunker caus­ing a mas­sive ex­plo­sion that blew through the bunker’s eight-foot thick walls. The ex­plo­sion killed four fire­fight­ers and two sol­diers.

Ac­cord­ing to the T&T Coast Guard re­tirees who doc­u­ment­ed the or­deal via Face­book, “The ex­plo­sion was so cat­a­stroph­ic that it was record­ed on the Richter Scale and parts of the bunker were found hun­dreds of me­tres away from ground ze­ro.”

The re­tirees said that this was con­sid­ered the dark­est day for na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty of­fi­cers to date and the Gov­ern­ment in ho­n­our of the six he­roes lat­er ded­i­cat­ed April 26 of each year Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Of­fi­cers Day of Ap­pre­ci­a­tion.

Late yes­ter­day af­ter­noon the T&T Reg­i­ment is­sued a brief state­ment say­ing they had no­ticed “fires along par­tial ar­eas of the hill­sides in the vicin­i­ty of the out­skirts of the Sup­port and Ser­vice Bat­tal­ion, Teteron Bar­racks.”

It said that im­me­di­ate steps had been tak­en to mit­i­gate its ef­fects.

The reg­i­ment said there was no dam­age to prop­er­ty or in­juries to any­one as they worked close­ly along­side the T&T Fire Ser­vice.

The state­ment end­ed, “From pre­lim­i­nary in­ves­ti­ga­tions, the fires have been at­trib­uted to the year­ly dry sea­son, which with it, cre­ates con­di­tions for brush fires to oc­cur.”