For the first 67 days of this year Jamaica has already recorded almost 2,000 bush fires, triggering concern that many have resulted from carelessness and that water collected for drinking and other domestic purposes has to be used to put out the flames.

Jamaica Fire Brigade (JFB) and Water Resources Authority (WRA) officials shared the unsettling information at a news conference called on Thursday by Minister of Local Government and Rural Development Desmond McKenzie.

“With just 67 days having been completed in 2023 — just two months and eight days — we have had 1,968 bush fires on record,” JFB Commissioner Stewart Beckford said.

He pointed out that last year a total of 3,518 bush fires were recorded. Some were classified as “acts of nature”; others were triggered by what he termed discarded light, such as cigarettes, and careless use of fires.

“What we are seeing so far in 2023 is an escalation of that pattern where, in almost every case, the bush fires are being directly caused by people’s actions.

“While the JFB continues the work preventing and responding to fires, there is also an individual and societal responsibility to stave off personal and community loss and tragedy,” the commissioner suggested.

He said that the profile of bush fires, especially so far this year, is particularly troubling. The key reasons being spontaneous combustion caused by heat and dry conditions, or combustion caused by lightning, and careless use of fires.

“It is only through the combined efforts of the brigade and citizens in their personal capacities, as well as in their roles as community members, that bush fires, and every other category of fire, will become rare, rather than the regular,” Beckford argued.

Water Resources Authority Managing Director Peter Clarke agreed and was more strident in his response to the issue of fires being triggered by careless handling of cigarette butts and discarded lights.

“There must be concern when the water that has been abstracted and gathered for domestic services is being used to out bush fires,” he said.

“We have a very serious and strong concern about that, and we have heard the minister say that there have been hundreds of trips to remove water from the Mona reservoir to out fires, by the use of helicopters, and that has been what we would call, for us, a negative impact on that abstracted resource.

“It pains us to know that water that has been extracted and been prepared for domestic use is now being redirected and diverted to out fires,” Clarke said.

“We recognise that fire can be spontaneously ignited; however, we can state that the areas where the fires are currently being ignited are not areas that readily support spontaneous combustion, and if it is not combustion, then it is an action that is either deliberate or careless,” he added.

Clarke said that he fully supported the position taken by McKenzie and Beckford that the fires are due to mostly to carelessness.

“This ignition is something that can be avoided,” he said, pointing out that the WRA is willing to look at citizens’ proposals, in terms of assisting, maintaining, preserving and protecting the watersheds.

“All of us have one common goal: to preserve the sustainability of our environment. We have to urge all our friends and our neighbours to cease and desist from igniting fires, because of the harm to the watersheds,” he said.

“They impact the water resources and create increased erosions, so that when we are gathering water we then have to probably not take the initial water into reservoirs because the sediment level is so high. This is created by the conditions that the bush fires would have set up, and so it leads to increased treatment costs; it leads to diversion of the water that could have been collected, but it has to be diverted because the erosions and sediments are so high,” he stated.

“We can make our watersheds and our water resources much better, if we act responsibly,” he argued.

McKenzie, in his comments, said, “What I can tell the country is that 99 per cent of these bush fires are caused by human error — either [by] burning of garbage or trying to clear fields, farmers burning out lands and persons smoking and throwing away the butt that have created major concerns.”

He said that last weekend the Fire Brigade had to call the Jamaica Defence Force to use its helicopters to lift water from the Mona reservoir in response to bush fires.

“I understand that almost 1,000 buckets of water were removed from the Mona reservoir to put out bush fires,” McKenzie said, adding that the water would have been of great use to communities, especially in Portland, and some other places which are in desperate need of water.

“I want to urge the country to be responsible this time. This is not the time to ignore the various warnings. This is not the time for the country to say, ‘No man, we soon get rain’. Based on the forecast, the country is not expecting any major rainfall until around May, and there is no guarantee that even that will happen when May comes,” McKenzie said.