The bicommunal Technical Committee on Environment has been on alert since a fire broke out at the landfill in occupied Koutsovendis, its co-chair Michalis Loizidis said. He is in contact with scientists monitoring the situation, he added, but the options for tackling it are very limited.
The fire is a surface blaze rather than one burning deep within the landfill, he said, but it still cannot be brought under control within hours. It would take “a few days, maybe weeks” before it is contained to the point where smoke emissions stop.
Loizidis noted that the site was funded as a sanitary landfill using EU funds. The EU office that monitors funding to Turkish Cypriots, he said, could step in to support structural improvements aimed at preventing a repeat of the situation. It could also find that protocols had not been followed and demand a new planning and remediation phase from the Turkish Cypriot side, in which the EU itself might also become involved.
He proposed developing an early-warning system on both sides of the island, using two or three instruments to monitor concentrations of specific toxic and hazardous gases, so that residents could be warned to stay indoors once levels exceeded a threshold that could affect the wider population, in the same way warnings are issued for dust. If the situation were severe, he said, evacuations should follow. In this case, he added, evacuations of areas within two to three kilometres of the landfill may have been warranted from the first day of the fire, Sunday.
Such simple measures, which could be taken from the Republic’s side, would matter a great deal to residents, he said, many of whom were calling around trying to work out how to protect their families. This was also an area where cooperation with the Republic’s Civil Defence could help build a real opportunity for better systems for informing residents, he added, and since an early-warning system already exists, there was no reason not to extend it to cover situations like this one.
Loizidis said reports put the fire’s extent at 20 to 25 dunams. Containment could take weeks, he said, because it is not known how deep the ground has been affected by heat, or what conditions will allow the fire to be extinguished given the scale of the damage at the landfill. Crews would try to extinguish as much of the fire as safely possible using bulldozers and other equipment, he said, until the affected area was reduced from kilometres to a few square metres, at which point it would be realistic to expect it to be out within a day or two.
He recalled that similar fires at Kotsiatis had also taken weeks to bring under control.
Asked what he would personally do to protect himself, Loizidis said that if the smell were strong, he would prefer to stay indoors with his family. He said he has an activated-carbon air purifier, which he uses against both particulates and synthetic solvents in the air, and that the stronger the smell, the more he would limit himself to staying indoors or walking only short distances.
He noted that an easterly or north-easterly wind, which carries smoke toward the government-controlled areas, is rare in Cyprus. It did occur, however, for a few hours on both Sunday and Monday.
(Information from Cyprus News Agency)
