Today's interview also gave us the opportunity to ask Castro about the 4 members of the Nuñez/Bacab family who perished in the San Pedro fire yesterday morning.
While the island continues to come to terms with this quadruple tragedy, there are survivors who were left homeless. 2 houses, one of them a 2-storey structure, were completely destroyed. A third house received extensive fire damage, but it is still standing.
NEMO Minister Edmond Castro told us what his ministry will be doing for the fire victims:
Hon. Edmond Castro - NEMO Minister
"First of all I must give my condolences to the family for those people out in San Pedro and I will be brief, I will be getting my brief from the fire department as to what went good and what went wrong and see how we could best improve. Each time there is an emergency or fire we try to sit down and see how best we could and do a better job next time."
Reporter
"Are you looking at the equipment of the firefighters out there?"
Hon. Edmond Castro
"It's a constant struggle, we're constantly trying to improve the equipment that we have, some of our trucks are very old, some are from 1969 but with the limited resources we are doing our best to make sure that we would do a little bit better each time. We have ordered some pumps that will be assisting the fire department out in San Pedro and Caye Caulker."
Reporter
"From a humanitarian standpoint, what is NEMO doing for the people out there that have been affected by the fire?"
Hon. Edmond Castro
"Definitely we have a standard NEMO packages, NEMO I believe by now we have already gone in and dealt with some of the most emergency things such as mattresses, stove, gas tanks, bedding material, food and so on. We have standard packages that we try to provide to people in times of that type of disaster."
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