Stop burning rubbish and insure your homes.
That is Chief Fire Officer Errol Maynard’s appeal to Barbadians.
He said the burning of rubbish by householders was a dangerous and unhealthy practice that needs to stop.
“You could imagine a Sunday morning and you just washed your clothes and put them on the line, then some person lights some rubbish and all of your clothes and your house is smoky? That is not the most pleasant experience,” said Maynard.
He said a lot of people suffer from respiratory illnesses, and the burning of rubbish like that impacted them as well.
Maynard said it was, therefore, critical that every householder gets home insurance, especially with the number of wooden houses in Barbados.
“Most of us can’t buy a new home. It takes us sometimes a lifetime to build a home [while] it takes a house, after it becomes well alight, approximately seven to ten minutes to be destroyed; so it’s a very short threshold. But you would have spent most of your life building that house.
“Insurance is probably just a couple hundred dollars and you could pay it in instalments to offset the possibility of your losing your property. So we encourage all Barbadians, everybody, they should have their properties insured and not underinsured either. You should insure it that if something happens you could rebuild and obtain that standard of living that you would have had before,” said Maynard. (SP)