No witch hunt
The Prosecutor’s Office has decided to take utility company GEBE to court for last week’s oil spill. The decision is based not just on that incident, but a study of the company’s repeated environmental offences.
After a turbulent period, the general impression is that GEBE has been doing well in terms of providing St. Maarten with a reliable and adequate supply of water and power in recent years. Many will remember how quickly its crews, with help from the ABC islands, were able to restore power to the island after major disasters such as Hurricanes Luis and Lenny.
Not only that, but it has continued to invest in underground cabling to make the island’s electricity grid more hurricane-resistant, as well as in equipment to meet the growing demand, caused in part by the considerable number of tourism-related projects completed, underway or in the planning.
In the middle of all that the company has come up with its own comprehensive water and sewage management plan to counter the one submitted by Dutch competitor Intaquin, negotiate a new Collective Labour Agreement with several advances for its employees and assist in the process to transfer the Central Government-owned company to the Windward Islands where it operates. At the same time the company has shown itself a good corporate citizen, supporting several good causes on the islands.
One aspect that has apparently not been receiving enough attention from GEBE, however, is the environmental impact of its operations. As well as the company may be doing in other areas, oil spills such as the one last week are a direct threat not only to the environment itself, but in this case to the island’s coastal waters and beaches, crucial ingredients of its tourism economy on which the livelihood of
the entire community depends.
GEBE has a big responsibility in that sense, toward not just the island and its current residents, but future generations as well. As such, the action by the prosecution should not be seen as a kind of “witch hunt,” but as a last-ditch effort to force the company to get serious about protecting the environment once and for all.
Considering its recent track record in other areas, we have no reason to doubt that GEBE will do just that.
Thank you!
Serious electric problems halted The Daily Herald’s presses in the night of Thursday to Friday. Thanks to great cooperation and input of the Today Newspaper, Nathaniel Walters of Walters Electronic NV, Oswald Electrical Repairs and Electec (as well as readiness of others to help out) our problems were solved over the weekend.
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