The major threats to life in Guyana

Feb 05, 2013 Editorial

People in Guyana are finding out that their lives are more likely to be snuffed out on the roads or by an armed bandit. Scarcely a day goes by without the media reporting that someone was involved in a car crash, or some pedestrian who happened to be standing at the side of the road when he or she was hit by a vehicle that lost control while trying to overtake another.
That was the case of a contractor who had dared to step out of his house in bright daylight to attend to an errand. Since then there have been others. One recently claimed the lives of two people and we now learn that the driver, a 17-year-old failed the sobriety test.
Obviously the parents of this child lacked supervisory capability. This child could not have started drinking alcohol overnight so to do so at seventeen would mean that his parents ignored this foible.
He has killed two people and injured so many others. His penalty would be lenient because the courts are not rigid when it comes to vehicle homicide.
In the United States an individual could be charged for murder if he drives recklessly and kills someone. In some states murder attracts the death penalty. Suffice it to say that the first person to be prosecuted under this new law is serving a prison sentence that could see him remain behind bars for the rest of his natural life.
But the penalty does not end there; relatives of the victims are now filing their civil action. In Guyana accident victims rarely go to the courts in pursuit of civil claims despite the criminal proceedings. And this may be the cause that people take driving on the streets for granted. In any case, the courts are not known to hand down rigid penalties.
The result is that drunk drivers get away with little more than a slap on their wrists, regardless of how much pain they leave in their wake. It has not escaped notice that many of these motorists, in the wake of an accident some drivers would either abandon their vehicles or would simply flee the scene of an accident.
While the roads are dangerous there is another threat, this time from fires. Most of the houses in the country are made of wood, but so too are many houses in other countries. The difference is that in Guyana these houses are being destroyed by fire at an alarming rate. These days it seems that hardly a week goes by without some building being destroyed by fire.
We can understand the odd case of a spark from an electric wire starting a fire if the wire is frayed or the insulation is of use no longer. But there have been fires caused by avoidable circumstances, the most common being arson. However, many are caused by careless use of naked flames—the child who set a mattress ablaze at West Demerara, the house that went up in flames because a lighted stove fell on the floor, the case of a rubbish fire getting out of hand and of course, the overloading of electrical points.
The Guyana Fire Service says that it educates people by placing articles in the print media. However, one needs to realize that the focus may be on the wrong people. There should be sessions in schools because children are perhaps the greatest change agents in the home.
The year is barely a month old and already there have been almost a dozen fires, two of them on Sunday alone.
What makes the situation so bad is that Guyanese are not known to be insurers of property. Their vehicles are insured by compulsion and this is to compensate the victims where necessary. But many homes are not insured because the homeowners are convinced that fires will not attack them.
So we are left to ask ourselves, “What costs the nation more? Vehicle accidents which affect the human resource or the fires that destroy material, almost all of which have to be imported?” And cars are all imported.

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The major threats to life in Guyana

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