Dear Editor,

In your March 29 edition of the newspaper, you printed a letter from Candy and George Gonzalez headed “20 years of misinformation.”

I read that letter and was in total agreement with it — an extremely good summary of all that has happened (or not happened) here in Cayo. Unfortunately, I did not write in support of that letter; I felt it stood on its own.

Now in the Amandala of June 7, comes BECOL’s response. I wondered who could possibly have written such a letter claiming that the courts had dismissed BELPO’s claims as baseless. I seem to recall listening to then Chief Justice Abdulai Conteh in the Supreme Court giving the judgement in favour of BELPO.

Had BELPO not continued their efforts through the court, I doubt any of the monitoring that now takes place would have happened. The minimum had been done, and that was it.

I checked the end of the letter to see who had written it; I assumed it was some newcomer who did not know the history.

No — it was Lynn Young, who I know has been there from the beginning (I first came across him in “The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw” by Bruce Barcott) — obviously a smart young man. How did he get it wrong?

The early warning system does NOT work; maybe some mechanism has been set up, but your average Cayo resident would not know what to do should they, by chance, hear the siren. I have never heard the siren, whether I have been in town or here at home in Esperanza.

We are now told that BECOL does “desktop simulations” as practice for a disaster. Do we know anything about such a practice? Seems to me like a cop-out.

OK, so the fish are doing fine; I doubt it! Maybe the testing has been more efficient than some of the other ventures, but all in all, I do not feel that BECOL has done a good job so far.

Sincerely,
Sally (and Leonardo) Caretella, Esperanza Village