Res­i­dents of Beau­car­ro in Cen­tral Trinidad want the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty (EMA) sand­blast­ing ac­tiv­i­ties by a petro­chem­i­cal com­pa­ny in Freeport which they claim is af­fect­ing their health.

The res­i­dents said they lodged nu­mer­ous re­ports with the EMA be­tween Oc­to­ber to De­cem­ber, the blast­ing op­er­a­tions con­tin­ued. They are con­cerned about the large plumes of dust that are blown in their homes and loud grind­ing sound from the ac­tiv­i­ty.

“This go­ing on sev­er­al months—well maybe six to sev­en months now. It does have a prob­lem when the wind turns the dust all over. The noise is an­oth­er prob­lem at nights too,” a res­i­dent said

“But the noise wouldn’t be all the time be­cause al­though they start up at 7 am they would go late some­times to 7 pm or a lit­tle lat­er but most times we no­ticed that they would fin­ish for the day by 5 pm or 6 pm.

When Guardian Me­dia vis­it­ed the site re­cent­ly there were sev­er­al work­ers sit­ting un­der a tent. One of them said of­fi­cials from the EMA vis­it­ed and spoke to the own­ers of the com­pa­ny. He said the com­pa­ny does work for off­shore com­pa­nies, restor­ing pipelines and sheet met­als “from rust to brand new.”

Com­pa­ny of­fi­cials have since said that the Freeport op­er­a­tions have been shut down and re­lo­cat­ed to Point Ga­le­o­ta.

How­ev­er, res­i­dents are still con­cerned since equip­ment and ma­te­r­i­al are still stored at the site.

An of­fi­cial at the EMA con­firmed that nu­mer­ous re­ports had made against the com­pa­ny and said the mat­ter is “un­der in­ves­ti­ga­tion.”