Sascha Wil­son and
Kellyann Lemessy 

Mere days shy of her 97th birth­day, Ame­na Moore is ap­peal­ing to the au­thor­i­ties to help save her home and re­store the road in her com­mu­ni­ty.

Moore’s home on Old Rio Claro Road in Ma­yaro is one of four in jeop­ardy due to land ero­sion that vil­lagers claim oc­curred due to a rup­tured Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA) pipeline. They claimed the wa­ter al­so caused a land­slip to de­vel­op and even­tu­al­ly the road was closed.

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia at her home, Moore said she be­lieved the trees in her yard she plant­ed decades ago had slowed the ero­sion, but she is was fear­ful that her house would even­tu­al­ly col­lapse.

“In the night, I does be hear­ing the land mov­ing, crick, crack. All my step mov­ing. All in the back there. The house it­self mov­ing be­cause you could see the slant­i­ng in­side the house and the floor­ing board do that (us­ing two fin­gers to show the space in the floor­ing).”  She said her son’s land on which he had his gar­den was al­so sink­ing. 

“We have to buy stone and make a next road to get in­to the gar­den. The sit­u­a­tion here I find we need this help and a lot of help. They don’t hear us. I re­main a kind of way help­less,” she lament­ed. 

An­oth­er res­i­dent, Ja­son House­nd, ex­plained that years ago WASA ran a four-inch line to sup­ply the com­mu­ni­ty, com­pris­ing about 60 homes, with pipe-borne wa­ter. How­ev­er, he said the wa­ter was not reach­ing the taps of half of the house­holds, in­clud­ing his home, which is sit­u­at­ed on the hill. He re­called that WASA tried to rec­ti­fy the is­sue, but they got lit­tle re­lief.  He said a few years ago, the road be­gan sink­ing and they re­alised that there was a wa­ter leak.

He said the re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tion did re­pairs but short­ly af­ter, the land­slip de­vel­oped. When that hap­pened House­nd said, they saw wa­ter gush­ing from the pipeline, but WASA’s re­sponse was slow. He claimed WASA even­tu­al­ly capped the line, but res­i­dents liv­ing on the hill were still not re­ceiv­ing wa­ter. Due to the road clo­sure, House­nd said, he had to close down his garage. “We are se­ri­ous­ly in­con­ve­nienced by this. We are not much (peo­ple) but we need peo­ple to ac­knowl­edge us. We need ac­cess to our own com­mu­ni­ty,” he lament­ed.

When con­tact­ed by Guardian Me­dia, Co­cal/Mafek­ing coun­cil­lor Renelle Kissoon said the land­slip de­vel­oped in De­cem­ber 2021 due to a WASA leak.  She said they wrote to the Min­istry of Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment in the first in­stance ask­ing to pri­ori­tise the land­slip un­der the Sec­ondary Roads Re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion and Im­prove­ment Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed (SR­RIC). In ad­di­tion, she said, the cor­po­ra­tion had ear­marked the land­slip re­pairs for this year for $1.4 mil­lion. How­ev­er, she said a site vis­it and sub­se­quent ge­ot­ech­ni­cal sur­vey last week found that the project would cost more than $2 mil­lion due to the con­stant de­te­ri­o­ra­tion of the land­slip. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, she said, the cost was far be­yond the cor­po­ra­tion’s fi­nan­cial means.

“I un­der­stand the frus­tra­tion of the im­pact­ed res­i­dents of the Old Rio Claro Ma­yaro Road, as their ac­cess to ba­sic re­sources like wa­ter con­nec­tion and garbage col­lec­tion are be­ing di­rect­ly cut off. Added to this, the phys­i­cal in­fra­struc­ture of the homes of these res­i­dents is be­ing com­pro­mised due to the land­slip.

“At this time due to the lim­it­ed re­sources at the MR­CRC, it is my sole hope that the Sec­ondary Roads Re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion and Im­prove­ment Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed pays spe­cial at­ten­tion to this project, which now falls un­der the Min­istry of Works and Trans­port, and we will con­tin­ue to make rep­re­sen­ta­tion to some­thing to be done.”

Guardian Me­dia at­tempt­ed to con­tact of­fi­cials of WASA but there was no re­sponse up to press time.