Bamburi Cement to destroy Mukumu Girls contaminated food

Bamburi Cement in Mombasa County on Friday received three tracks of contaminated cereals from Mukumu Girls high school for incineration.

This comes after the school reported three cases of students who lost their lives and one teacher after consuming food believed to have been contaminated.

The Kakamega National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) county director for environment John Maniafu said that the cereals which were transported for the incineration process include 443 bags of maize, 253 bags of beans and 83 bags of rice.

He said through the analysis of national public health laboratories, the cereals were found unfit for consumption and seized by public health department.

He said that the multi-agency team which was tasked to make a decision in terms of disposal decided to do the process at Bamburi Cement because there is a low capacity of incinerators within the Western region.

“We first checked with our two incinerators which have low capacity that is the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) incinerator in Kisumu which has a capacity of 100 kilograms of incineration per hour while the one at Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital in Eldoret which has a capacity of 150 kgs per hour before we settled on Bamburi,” he said.

According to him, the stakeholders in Kakamega preferred the condemned food to be burnt in Kakamega but that could not happen as stated in the waste management regulations 2006 under the environment and coordination act that gives guidance in terms of disposal of hazardous materials including condemned food.

“Looking at the 74 tons of food that are condemned, it could have taken a long time and therefore we preferred a clink that can handle a huge quantity of waste. The Bamburi clink will incinerate the waste in less than two days and that is why we made this trip to Mombasa,” he said.

He said that they were also working on a government-to-government basis because there were no enough resources to incinerate the waste.

Kakamega County executive committee member for education Godfrey Owuor said that as a county, they will help the school following the loss incurred.

“We are very lucky that the Bamburi cement offered to do the destruction for us on behalf of the county government, the school and the community of Kakamega County, we have seen what has been done and we are satisfied with the process.”

Franklin Ongori, the county DCC said that the whole process of disposal was done because they also wanted to restore confidence in parents and the entire community.

The school deputy principal in charge of academics  Fredrick Odera said that they are opening soon and therefore they needed to dispose of the food.

 “I have witnessed the cereals being destroyed and we want to thank the management of Bamburi for accepting to help the school in disposing of the food through incineration as per the law,” he said

“We have discontinued all the previous suppliers of cereals, and we have new suppliers. We have also brought on board public health to inspect all food that is coming in school and have them certified through testing them in their laboratories,” he said.

He said that once that is done, the food will be safe for all the learners.

He said that they have also worked on the water systems with the goodwill of the Ministry of Water.

“We have new boreholes and cleaned tanks. Through a well-wisher, we now have a water purification plant worth Sh6 million shillings in school which will ensure that the water that the students are using is clean and fit for human consumption.

Bamburi Cement Environment Manager Otieno Arowo said they will confirm the total tons after the weighbridge once the exercise is complete.

“The disposal here is by incineration and we are purely doing controlled burning so what happens is that the post-management of this is basically well controlled and this is a NEMA licensed facility to do the same kind of incineration so cereals is just one of them,” he said.

He said that the first process that they are going to do is denaturing where they will offload, spread the material and introduce other waste to contaminate it so that nobody can use it.

“The kind of incineration we are doing is basically to do as we do our normal production. Our process takes one to 1.5 tons every hour so based on that we will calculate the total amount that we will receive,” he said.

James Wachunga from the Department of county food safety and food quality said that going forward, every school once it procures cereals must take samples to government chemists or public health laboratories for analysis just to ensure the food is safe.

“The World Food Program has been supporting us with a food safety lab in the county and so far they have trained a few public health officers on how to test the food before they are consumed. Going forward, all schools in the county will be required to take in the lab any procured food,” he said.

He said that as a department, they have recommended that all schools must get somebody who is qualified and approved to put chemicals in the cereals and ensure that they inform the Ministry of Agriculture.

Wachunga said that the contaminated cereals from Mukumu girls’ high school had high levels of malagial chemicals which were above the recommended quantity and this is according to the report from national public health laboratories.