The Anguilla and Air and Sea Ports Authority is the recipient of a newly refurbished fire truck from Canada that will further enhance the operations of the Clayton J Lloyd International Airport to go beyond a category 6 and facilitate category 7 on demand in the landing of 737s – Corporate or private jets.
“The fire truck that recently arrived in Anguilla is a very important piece of equipment that has been necessary for us to get here in Anguilla to improve our capacity to operate, properly, safely and securely,” said Mr Marcel Fahie, Chairman of the AASPA.
“You would have noticed that other heavy equipment have been brought into Anguilla by other companies and put on a trailor and moved …When the supplier sends the equipment to you, the agreement that you have is that when it is received, they have to send their mechanics or mechanical engineers to inspect the equipment to make sure it is in the same state it was in before it was shipped. Therefore, you just don’t drive it around and drive it on its own. You minimize that and ideally don’t drive it all until the mechanics come and certify it, and once it is certified then it is available for handover to the owner,” Fahie said as he dispelled the rumour that the truck was not in good condition.
“The mechanic was here and checked it out thoroughly, and a certificate is to be issued. We are working towards having the vehicle commissioned and handed over to Social Security and then in turn handed over to Government.”
Mr Fahie mentioned that while there are two other fire trucks, one semi-functional, the other old and repaired but fairly good, “the Ministry and AASPA decided that it was essential we get an additional fire truck. The way it has been put together is that we proposed to the Social Security Board to acquire the truck, so they own it and leased it to Government/ AASPA for Airport operations.” He continued: “Why that structure? The normal thing one would say is that Government or AASPA borrow the money and buy the truck, but given the overall level of borrowing that the Government has undertaken, and given that any borrowing by the Anguilla Air and Sea Ports Authority, 80% has to be guaranteed by Government, it means that even if AASPA went and borrow the money directly, then the Government will still have to do a guarantee of 80% which adds to the Government debt and Government did not want to go and increase its debt any further.”
Mr. Fahie concluded: “I have asked the Airport Quality Assurance Manager, and the Safety Manager through Mr Allen Bonnet (Airport Executive Manager), to do an audit of a process that we are going through to make this happen because the lease document [for the fire truck] has a number of things specified. So they are going through that. They are going to short list them and they will check that we have done everything before everything is signed off.So we are very thorough.”
