Rishard Khan

Lo­cal con­trac­tor Coos­al’s mo­bilised a team on Mon­day night and be­gan re­pairs to the St He­le­na By­pass road which has been left in a state of dis­re­pair for over three weeks.

This comes af­ter com­plaints by res­i­dents and mo­torists that con­di­tion of the road had the po­ten­tial to cause se­ri­ous ac­ci­dents as dri­vers dodge craters left be­hind when the as­phalt was re­moved.

Con­di­tions on the road wors­ened as heavy rains and flood­ing over the past two months re­moved even more ma­te­r­i­al. Guardian Me­dia vis­it­ed the site and res­i­dents of St He­le­na said they were fear­ful that the cur­rent con­di­tion of the road pos­es a se­ri­ous safe­ty risk to mo­torists.

In prepa­ra­tion for repaving two months ago, Coos­al’s “dug up” an es­ti­mat­ed 1,200 me­ters of the St He­le­na By­pass Road, be­gin­ning at the St He­le­na junc­tion and end­ing just be­fore the Caribbean Air­lines Head Of­fice.

How­ev­er, res­i­dents such as 58-year-old Camel­la Ramhar­rack, who has lived in the area her en­tire life, said this was the ex­tent of any re­pairs made so far to the road­way.

“All I can say is when I was pass­ing on the road to­wards the old air­port there were Coos­al’s peo­ple and they block off the road…when we came back the next morn­ing, ab­solute­ly noth­ing was done,” Ramhar­rack said.

The con­di­tions, the res­i­dents said, had been de­plet­ing ever since and were wors­ened by the re­cent flood­ing and rain­fall.

Ac­counts vary of ex­act­ly how many mo­torists have dam­aged their ve­hi­cles so far on these holes; one thing the res­i­dents could agree on is that there cer­tain­ly were nu­mer­ous oc­cur­rences.

Ken­ny Dabideen, 71, who owns a roti shop op­po­site one of the stealth­i­est holes, which hides from the sight of on­com­ing traf­fic at the turn-off in­to the by­pass road and is on­ly vis­i­ble at the last sec­ond, claims to have seen as much as five ve­hi­cles se­ri­ous­ly dam­aged from drop­ping in­to that very hole but fears the is­sue to be more se­ri­ous than sim­ply dam­aged ve­hi­cles.

“The road is so bad, there is hole all over the place. Even if you could see here (point­ing to the hole), when cars go down here you could lose your front end. It al­most cause fa­tal ac­ci­dent,” he said.

Dabideen’s con­cern was al­most made a re­al­i­ty by a near miss with a truck at­tempt­ing to avoid the dan­ger­ous ter­rain while Guardian Me­dia was tak­ing pho­tos.

Sub­se­quent to the vis­it, Group Chair­man, Siu­nar­ine Coos­als reached out to Guardian Me­dia to as­sure the pub­lic he was aware of the sit­u­a­tion.

Head en­gi­neer at the com­pa­ny, Glenn Ma­habirs­ingh ex­plained that the com­pa­ny is us­ing a process called “Foam Bi­tu­men” to re­pair the road­way which was dis­rupt­ed with the re­cent heavy rains and floods.

The process, which was al­so done on the Churchill-Roo­sevelt High­way near UWI, in­volves the re­cy­cling of the ma­te­ri­als al­ready present on the roads and is de­signed to be at al­most one-third the cost of more tra­di­tion­al meth­ods.

“It’s a new tech­nol­o­gy in terms of road re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion with­out clos­ing the road­way. So con­ven­tion­al­ly…the process would be to close the road, ex­ca­vate it, put in lay­ers and al­low traf­fic to run some time in the fu­ture. But this process is called foam bi­tu­men, which is used in­ter­na­tion­al­ly where you use the ex­ist­ing ma­te­ri­als in the road, you add lime and ce­ment with bi­tu­men and you al­low it to cure.”

The cur­ing process, Ma­habirs­ingh said, was ad­verse­ly dis­rupt­ed by the flood­ing which cov­ered parts of the road in sev­er­al feet of wa­ter, wash­ing the sur­face ma­te­r­i­al away.

He, how­ev­er, said it was on­ly the sur­face ag­gre­gate that was washed away while the base lay­er, which is 12 inch­es deep, is what mo­torists are cur­rent­ly trav­el­ling on.

When asked why works co­in­ci­den­tal­ly be­gan a few hours af­ter me­dia vis­it­ed the site, Ma­habirs­ingh in­di­cat­ed the works were planned over the week­end and pro­duced an in­ter­nal email sent on Sun­day night to crews in­struct­ing the for the com­menc­ment of works on Mon­day.