Vol­un­teers in Green­vale, La Hor­quet­ta were brought to tears yes­ter­day, af­ter they saw the ex­tent of the dam­age in the area for them­selves.

House Im­prove­ment eval­u­a­tors from the Min­istry of So­cial De­vel­op­ment vis­it­ed the area to do their as­sess­ments. How­ev­er, many res­i­dents, like Wayne Bel­con, felt the min­i­mal house re­pair grant of­fered was in­suf­fi­cient giv­en the dis­as­trous im­pact of floods in the area.

The grant starts at $15,000 and is raised to $20,000 in cas­es of a dis­as­ter.

"$15,000? My bed alone is $10,000. Is on­ly two months I buy that!" said Bel­con, a work­er with the Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (HDC) who said he would hus­tle taxi to make ends meet.

He begged the Gov­ern­ment to in­crease the al­lo­ca­tion.

"Meet peo­ple some­where nah, you know this turn­ing peo­ple to do like me. You know what this turn­ing me to do from here if I can't get a prop­er start again from here?" said Bel­con.

"Still reach we halfway nah."

Green­vale con­tin­ued to be the cen­tre of re­lief at­ten­tion as sev­er­al vol­un­teers en­tered the area.

T&TEC of­fi­cials had al­ready com­plet­ed re­pairs on some of the dam­aged me­ters while fire of­fi­cers once again were out in force lend­ing as­sis­tance to var­i­ous res­i­dents.

Of­fi­cials from both Bmo­bile and Dig­i­cel were al­so in the area at var­i­ous points in the day.

How­ev­er, pas­tor Mar­garet Lee, of the Diego Mar­tin church Je­sus is the An­swer Praise Cen­tre, was brought to tears as she and her group brought lunch­es to the area.

"To hear about it and to come see for your­self is two dif­fer­ent things. This is heart-break­ing," said Lee, who ex­plained the group had planned to come on a lat­er date to do clean up but in­stead came to pro­vide lunch­es yes­ter­day.

"We tried to help res­i­dents as best as we could. We tried to come an­oth­er day and come clean but to­day we just brought food and drink be­cause I don't think a ham­per is go­ing to help here.

“There is no fridge, no stove there is noth­ing. So ham­pers will not help," said Lee told Guardian Me­dia.

They pro­vid­ed 100 meals to res­i­dents in the area.

Green­vale res­i­dent Sharon Hamil­ton said many were still not aware of the ex­tent of the dev­as­ta­tion. Her home housed 13 chil­dren. She said de­spite their clean­ing ef­forts over the last three days the home was still not hab­it­able.

"That is tsuna­mi, that can't be a flood. We clean­ing three days now. You think we could sleep here?" Hamil­ton asked.