Emergency services were taken care of

THE EMERGENCY services such as ambulances, fire engines and police cars were provided as much fuel as they needed during the three-day strike, they said yesterday.

“For obvious reasons emergency services reached agreements to have their vehicles filled up without having to use the only remaining petrol stations open to the public,” a police officer said.

Taxi drivers and bus companies said they had to queue along with the rest of the consumer public.

A Limassol taxi driver said he had noticed a slight increase in business but not enough to make up for the inconvenience of the long queues.

“Maybe there was a 10 or 15 per cent increase,” he said. “It’s was very slight.”

Nicosia Buses Ltd general manager Costas Christodoulou said the company had found ways of making the situation workable but that it was still a hindrance.

“We had to remove buses from their bus routes and give them an hour to go and fill up their tanks while we replaced them with other buses to ensure the bus routes weren’t disrupted,” he said.

Christodoulou said there had been some cost involved in the upheaval but that it was still early days to affect business too much.

He added that thoughts were given to purchasing a tanker for the company’s exclusive use but that this was illegal.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.