Dear Editor,
Firefly B.V. being from 2011 the only company on St. Maarten to import and sell consumer fireworks has taken note of the article publisher in The Daily Herald of December 20, 2017, in which the Fire Department announcement that only certain types of fireworks would be allowed to be imported this year due to the passing of Hurricane Irma and the fact that many houses were without roofs.
This concern stems from the fact that Department of VROMI [Public Housing, Spatial Planning, Environment and Infrastructure – Ed.] believes that fireworks that explode in the air can cause the tarpaulins that are still on some houses to catch fire and burn down these houses.
The statement from the Fire Department goes on to say that all the stakeholders, being Firefly B.V. have been informed of these concerns.
When we went to VROMI to submit our hindrance permit documents on October 2, 2017, one of the department’s representatives expressed those concerns.
We did our homework and researched this concern. Our findings was that when fireworks explode approximately 50m up in the air, nothing comes down but dust.
On a subsequent visit to VROMI the acting Prime Minister at the time Mr. Rafael Boasman said he was aware of the situation and would look into it.
At that time Firefly offered to give the PM and others concerned a live or video demonstration that those concerns were unfounded.
Nobody accepted the offer.
It’s unfortunate that the Fire Department without any visible or scientific proof decided to issue a ban on certain items for this year.
Firefly B.V. like any other corporate citizen respects the laws of the land.
When deciding on the ban on these items one must consider that every year we face the possibility that another hurricane might strike our country.
Therefore, clear thinking must prevail and not a knee-jerk reaction based on emotions.
In 1995 after the passing of Hurricane Luis we had about the same situation with a lot of houses without roofs and with tarpaulins.
There were no reports of houses burning down because of fireworks exploding in the air, why now.
We start from January preparing for December.
If every year there’s a hurricane and this unproven concern ban on these items stands, we might as well close up shop, because it’s not worth the time and effort invested in it from January.
When government takes a decision it should be a fair and just decision.
We believe that we should have been given the opportunity to prove that fireworks exploding 50m in the air pose no danger other than any firework when used in a responsible manner.

Collins Arrundell
Managing Director

Dear Editor,
I am not looking for pity I am looking for help for a whole year and more. I became homeless when my home was auctioned. I begged my Government for help; they could not find no way to help me and my family, so I begged them to leave me be and sleep in a container until I could get out of my mess and get a place to rent.

Dear Editor,

  I am a Saban and as time goes by and people come and go, I stop to remember how things changed on this small rock over the years. And I have to to give praise where praise is due.

  Many Sabans have worked hard and sacrificed to make this island what it is today. So many come to our island and when they see her beauty, they want to tell us what we have to keep it that way. We Sabans thought ourselves how to take care of our island and still can do it.

  There is a person in my humble opinion who has done so for this island for decades, and I have never expressed it to him before. But I want to remind my fellow Sabans about him. As a young man, he came back to Saba from St. Maarten and formed a political party, and the pride and fight he was able to stir up in us Sabans was never seen before.

  For the other islands in the Netherlands Antilles and the Kingdom Saba was just a bystander who would speak only when spoken to and would be humble to receive whatever was handed down to it. This person if you ask me, put Saba on the map, where those in the Neth. Ant. and the Kingdom were finally told that the people of Saba and the island were just as important and counted just as much as everybody in the Neth. Ant. and the Kingdom.

  Thanks to him we (Saba) was finally given her own seat in the Neth. Ant. parliament and recognized enough that we had our junior ministers sitting in Willemstad! Something that was unheard of, before he came back to this island. It was a mission impossible that he made possible! Who would have thought that we would have our own newspaper called the Saba Herald, where it was always about Saba and her people?

  This person took it upon himself to document the history of Saba and our ancestors going back centuries. Without his work it would have all been lost and many want to take it over and not even their great-grandmother’s navel strings is buried on Saba.

  In his years in office he made sure that everyone walked the straight and narrow, unlike what we see today. Those things would never be accepted.

  Will Johnson is a man that loves Saba and is for her people and we need him back in that chair.

A proud WIPM supporter

Name withheld at author's request. 

Dear Editor,
A week or so ago this newspaper announced the awarding of a building permit for some towers to be built in Cupecoy or thereabouts. The lead editorial made observations about the project and its survivability and the final tag line made by the Editor, when talking about that survivability, was “they get the benefit of the doubt.”
It made me cringe when I read it because in any sort of modern society and certainly in this day and age, Engineering is no longer a matter of guesswork and luck. It is a function of the pure mechanical sciences that define loads and tolerances.
Luck has nothing to do with it and so, with all due respect, Mr. Editor, you are dead wrong. They are not owed the benefit of the doubt. The designers and Engineers should be held to the highest standards and their credentials, work and calculations vetted by individuals at VROMI [Ministry of Public Housing, Spatial Planning, Environment and Infrastructure – Ed.] or elsewhere if necessary by individuals with real degrees in Engineering and vast experience in these types of structures. Any doubts should be erased before the first shovel of dirt is raised.
I drive around this island and I watch people rebuilding and I see them making the same mistakes they made in the first place over and over again. Long spans with inadequate materials. Incorrect and overly-wide spacings of rafters to save money on materials. Completely nonstructural joints at critical intersections. The most simple and basic correct practices and methods routinely ignored, guaranteeing as a matter of literal fact that the new roofs and structures will fail in exactly the same way as the old ones did.
When I see homeowners doing it themselves I recognize that these guys are doing the very best they can and to the limit of their knowledge. They aren't professionals and they don't know any better and are doing the best they can with the best they have to work with under brutal pressure to get something done. God bless them, and I hope it all works out, but when I see so-called professional contractors doing it simply makes me sad. Clients are paying big money to have things done badly and that is both a tragedy and completely avoidable.
And so comes my suggestion: What VROMI needs to do is simply get a copy of the Dade County, Florida, building code and adopt it as their own. Dade county in Florida has the toughest standards for new construction anywhere in the U.S. with the possible exception of the California earthquake standards. They are the result of generations of storms wreaking havoc on Florida and the Engineers there reacting with tougher and tougher codes and the results getting better and better. Just get a copy, take a Sharpie and cross out Dade County and write in “VROMI SXM“ and claim them as your own.
Then start making and enforcing a licensing and bonding system for contractors. Hold them accountable for their work and their failures. Drive the hacks out of business and allow the truly-skilled to flourish. It would require a rigid professional inspection regime carried out by, once again, professionals that know their job.
It will make a lot of people mad. Cries of “That's the way we always did it before” will ring out from the unskilled and uneducated who will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the realm of competence and knowledge. It will take great courage, strength and determination by someone in authority downtown to make sure that the system gets enforced, but over time and in the end, the culture will change and people will stop building badly and the devastation from bad storms will be vastly reduced.
It's not magic and it’s not rocket science. All that's required are real engineers with real degrees doing the designing, followed by competent contractors utilizing skilled workers to do the building, all being inspected on a rigid schedule by individuals with the power to say “NO, that does not meet code. Tear it out and do it right.”
I wonder if that courage actually exists here.

Steven Johnson

Editor’s note: What the editorial said was that the need to prepare for category 5-plus hurricanes at this point would be obvious to any developer. A building permit has been issued, meaning the current conditions were met. If more stringent requirements are needed, Government must indeed put them in place, but the project should not be dismissed beforehand for lack of such, never mind that the initiator has an existing property in the same area that reportedly stood up to Irma relatively well.