Am­bi­ka Ja­gas­sars­ingh

Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment for Ma­yaro Rush­ton Paray is call­ing on the Gov­ern­ment to up­date the pub­lic on the sta­tus of the con­struc­tion of the Man­zanil­la Road.

This is be­cause in less than four months, the tem­po­rary ten-kilo­me­tre Ma­yaro By­pass Road, which was built along­side the de­stroyed Man­zanil­la Road to give com­muters a work­ing route, at a cost of $14 mil­lion, has be­come rid­dled with pot­holes.

The by­pass road be­came nec­es­sary af­ter flood­wa­ters washed away part of Man­zanil­la/Ma­yaro Road last year, mak­ing it im­pass­able.

How­ev­er, due to the cur­rent con­di­tion of the by­pass road, Paray said, “the con­stituents of Ma­yaro are boil­ing right now.”

Paray said he has tried nu­mer­ous times to get an up­date on the promised tech­ni­cal re­port to be­gin the per­ma­nent con­struc­tion of the new road­way from Min­is­ter of Works and Trans­port Ro­han Sinanan, but is yet to get a re­sponse.

“I’ve asked the min­is­ter via my me­dia re­lease to come out in the pub­lic and say, ‘What is the sta­tus of this? Have the tech­ni­cal draw­ings been done? Did the ten­der go out to bid? Have you se­cured your five con­trac­tors? And when is the new road go­ing to start? None of those three ques­tions has been an­swered by the min­is­ter ei­ther in pri­vate to me, or even to the me­dia. So, we still await our re­sponse from the min­is­ter on that.”

He said he had not re­ceived any in­for­ma­tion re­gard­ing the be­gin­ning of Phase 2 con­struc­tion of the road­ways. He said to his knowl­edge, a tech­ni­cal sur­vey was sup­posed to be­gin in Jan­u­ary, kick­start­ing the re­pairs.

“Jan­u­ary, Feb­ru­ary was the de­sign phase. And when a de­sign is ap­proved, in March, it will go out to ten­der. In March, the ten­der, they would have bro­ken the 10 kilo­me­tre road­way in­to five 2-kilo­me­tre con­tracts. So, ba­si­cal­ly, they would give five con­trac­tors five pieces to build be­cause he (Sinanan) said that the Prime Min­is­ter had asked that the road be com­plet­ed by Sep­tem­ber, be­cause Sep­tem­ber, Oc­to­ber, No­vem­ber is when the heavy rains come and he did not want to have a sit­u­a­tion again.”

Paray said af­ter the De­cem­ber 2022 floods, the Gov­ern­ment cre­at­ed the by­pass road on the west­ern side of the Man­zanil­la Road, close to the Nar­i­va Swamp, to al­low the flow of traf­fic be­tween San­gre Grande and Ma­yaro.

He said since then, “about 80% of the sur­face of the road has de­te­ri­o­rat­ed. Which means any per­son dri­ving about 8 to 10 kilo­me­tres on that piece of road­way, your ve­hi­cle feels like it wants to fall apart.”

He ac­knowl­edged that the build­ing of the road­way it­self came with chal­lenges.

The first was putting an as­phalt sur­face on the road at 10 or $12 mil­lion, know­ing that a new 10-kilo­me­tre road is ear­marked to be built be­fore the year is over. The sec­ond was that they could not use any pe­tro­le­um-based binder be­cause it could have had an en­vi­ron­men­tal im­pact on the swamp area.

Paray said he con­tact­ed the Pro­gramme for Up­grad­ing Roads Ef­fi­cien­cy Unit (PURE) and Sinanan to pro­vide tem­po­rary work­ing so­lu­tions.

“I’ve al­so ad­vised them and said in the in­ter­im, can you just grade it and roll it back and per­haps you may have to grade and roll once a month to at least al­low for an eas­i­er jour­ney on the by­pass road. I mean, it’s $14 mil­lion that was spent to build the road and I can’t jus­ti­fy to con­stituents af­ter $14 mil­lion, this is the con­di­tion of the road that you have to dri­ve on.”

Paray said PURE be­gan some re­me­di­al work on the Man­zanil­la by­pass road last Thurs­day, which is ex­pect­ed to pro­vide some much-need­ed re­lief. He said while he did not con­done protest ac­tion tak­en by con­stituents last week to high­light the mat­ter, he un­der­stands their frus­tra­tion.

“When you have a break­down in the Man­zanil­la Road, it means that we lose busi­ness. Our hote­liers lose busi­ness, and our restau­rants lose busi­ness be­cause no­body is go­ing to leave Port-of-Spain to come to San Fer­nan­do o take that very bru­tal Na­pari­ma Ma­yaro Road to come to Ma­yaro. They’re not go­ing to do it.”

Apart from busi­ness­es, health­care ac­cess was an is­sue.

“Then emer­gency med­ical ser­vices, San­gre Grande Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal, it’s a clos­er and eas­i­er run for pre­mi­um med­ical ser­vices. You have emer­gency med­ical ser­vices, you have po­lice of­fi­cers, you have EMT, who has to strad­dle that route back and for­ward. When that link breaks, we are at a dis­ad­van­tage,” Paray said.

Res­i­dent An­drew Brooks, who was se­vere­ly im­pact­ed by the De­cem­ber 2022 floods af­ter los­ing part of his home, said he hoped they would get pos­i­tive ac­tion be­fore the up­com­ing rainy sea­son.

“This rainy sea­son com­ing in June is go­ing to be ter­ri­ble here in Man­zanil­la... I am scared... that road is go­ing to turn in­to a riv­er or a swamp be­cause the swamp is on the right side,” he said.

“Mil­lions were spent and hon­est­ly it doesn’t even look like $2 mil­lion was spent.”

He said busi­ness­es in the area have come to a stand­still, since there just are not enough cus­tomers tra­vers­ing the roads to keep them afloat.

“Com­merce is non-ex­is­tent now. Some of the lo­cals would put their lit­tle fruits out, their co­conuts, man­goes, but it has less traf­fic be­cause peo­ple don’t want to dam­age their ve­hi­cles.”

Asked if he had hopes the road will fixed in the near fu­ture, Brooks said, “It’s a type of wait-and-see thing and on­ly when some­thing hap­pens peo­ple run and do what they have to do.”

Con­tact­ed on the is­sue, Works and Trans­port Min­is­ter Sinanan said on­go­ing re­me­di­al works are be­ing done on the tem­po­rary Man­zanil­la By­pass Road, which has al­lowed con­nec­tiv­i­ty to hun­dreds of mo­torists.

Sinanan re­mind­ed the pub­lic that the road was a tem­po­rary one and it had to be main­tained all the time.

“The op­tions we gave was ei­ther that we close off the road and pass through Biche, but we de­cid­ed that was not the best op­tion, and so we built this tem­po­rary by­pass road to re­store con­nec­tiv­i­ty,” he said.

He not­ed that the fi­nal de­signs of the per­ma­nent road were be­ing com­plet­ed and the tem­po­rary road is be­ing con­tin­u­al­ly main­tained. Say­ing he and a team from the min­istry planned to vis­it the area soon, Sinanan al­so pro­vid­ed pho­tos and videos of the on­go­ing re­me­di­al work.

—With re­port­ing by Rad­hi­ca De Sil­va