Sascha Wil­son

With the re­lax­ation of the stay-at-home re­stric­tions, work at Camp La Ro­maine is now back on track and ex­pect­ed to be com­plet­ed next month. NIPDEC gen­er­al man­ag­er Ray­mond Hack­ett said yes­ter­day that the $22.2 mil­lion project was de­layed due to the COVID-19 re­stric­tions.

This project is part of the Gov­ern­ment’s ef­forts to en­hance bor­der se­cu­ri­ty and Trinidad and To­ba­go De­fence Force (TTDF) in­fra­struc­ture, Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Fitzger­ald Hinds had said dur­ing a pass­ing out pa­rade for mem­bers of the Reg­i­ment, Air Guard and Coast Guard at Teteron Bar­racks, Ch­aguara­mas, in May.

In ad­di­tion, he said two com­pa­nies of the Sec­ond In­fantry Bat­tal­ion of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Reg­i­ment (TTR) were to be re­lo­cat­ed from the He­li­port, Ch­aguara­mas, to Camp La Ro­maine.

Ac­cord­ing to NIPDEC’s web­site, the project in­volves the de­sign and con­struc­tion of five build­ings with a stand­by pow­er sup­ply and the con­struc­tion of a waste­water treat­ment plant.

The fa­cil­i­ty will pro­vide ac­com­mo­da­tion for 192 reg­i­ment per­son­nel and in­cludes dor­mi­to­ries, a laun­dry fa­cil­i­ty, meet­ing and recre­ation­al spaces. At the sod-turn­ing cer­e­mo­ny in No­vem­ber 2019, the then min­is­ter said sol­diers would have been re­lo­cat­ed at the end of May.

Re­spond­ing to ques­tions via What­sapp yes­ter­day, Hack­ett said the project’s com­ple­tion date is now Au­gust 18.

“There was some de­lay due to the COVID-19 stay-at-home re­stric­tions and it would have start­ed back on­ly this week. But it is large­ly com­plete, it is phys­i­cal­ly com­plete, all the equip­ment is in, so it’s re­al­ly just the ap­provals WASA, T&TEC and so on that is be­ing done now.”

He could not say whether the sol­diers had been re­lo­cat­ed to the La Ro­maine base.

At­tempts to reach Chief of De­fence Staff Dar­ryl Daniel were un­suc­cess­ful, while up to press time there was no re­sponse from the reg­i­ment’s pub­lic re­la­tions of­fi­cer Cap­tain Cleav­on Dil­lon on the mat­ter.

Hinds had al­so spo­ken about the pur­chase of two Cape Class pa­trol ves­sels to strength­en the ca­pac­i­ty and ca­pa­bil­i­ty of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Coast Guard (TTCG). The ves­sels ar­rived on Tues­day.

Hinds al­so said that one of the AW 139 he­li­copters will be rein­te­grat­ed back in­to ser­vice to pro­vide es­sen­tial air sur­veil­lance sup­port to the Coast Guard.

These ini­tia­tives came in the back­drop of heavy crit­i­cism of the Gov­ern­ment, par­tic­u­lar­ly dur­ing the 16 months of the pan­dem­ic, over porous bor­ders con­tribut­ing to the rise of COVID-19 in­fec­tions, al­leged­ly due to il­le­gal im­mi­grants en­ter­ing the coun­try.

Hinds could not be reached for com­ment yes­ter­day.