Rum­ble strips, safe­ty bar­rels, crash bar­ri­ers and fresh paint mark­ings have been in­stalled at the Gand­hi Vil­lage Round­about, pop­u­lar­ly called the ‘Debe Death Round­about’, fol­low­ing a se­ries of fa­tal ac­ci­dents over the past few years.

Dur­ing a tour of the round­about on Tues­day, Min­is­ter of Works Ro­han Sinanan said the on­go­ing road works at that site will be com­plet­ed as the Gov­ern­ment moves to fin­ish the Solomon Ho­choy High­way Ex­ten­sion, which links Point Fortin to Port-of-Spain.

This, he said, will be com­plet­ed by mid-next year.

But when asked why the min­istry took so long to im­ple­ment the safe­ty mea­sures at the round­about, Sinanan said: “This is a tem­po­rary round­about, I can’t say why it wasn’t com­plet­ed in 2014/2015. What I can say is we have con­tin­u­ous­ly up­grad­ed the in­ter­sec­tion and the in­ten­tion is to con­tin­ue the high­way all the way down.”

Say­ing his heart goes out to all those who lost loved ones, Sinanan said: “What we urge the dri­vers to do, is to try to obey the reg­u­la­tions on the road. In the past, we had some ac­ci­dents at this point where in­di­ca­tions were that peo­ple were ac­tu­al­ly speed­ing on the round­about or it could be that peo­ple would have dropped asleep and we had some in­ci­dents where peo­ple would have crashed straight in­to the bar­ri­ers.”

Say­ing the min­istry has up­grad­ed the in­ter­sec­tion, Sinanan ex­plained: “We have put in the plas­tic drums, cre­at­ed a sort of an im­pact wall down there. We im­proved the light­ing and re­paint­ed the area. We are putting in this morn­ing some rum­ble strips.”

He said the pro­cure­ment of two pro­file paint ma­chines for $150,000 will save the Gov­ern­ment mon­ey. 

Dur­ing the min­is­ter’s in­ter­view, one of the ma­chines over­heat­ed and ap­peared to be mov­ing un­con­trol­lably. How­ev­er, it was im­me­di­ate­ly switched off. Sinanan said the ma­chines will ben­e­fit tax­pay­ers.

“In the past, we ac­tu­al­ly cut the road but that was a very cost­ly ex­er­cise be­cause to put in that sort of rum­ble strip, where you’re cut­ting the road, you had to bring in a milling ma­chine and they had to work the whole night. On av­er­age, that would cost us about $60,000 to $75,000 to do just one area be­cause of the amount of equip­ment that had to come in,” he said.

Sinanan said the new rum­ble strip/pro­fil­ing paint ma­chines are used across the world.

The ma­chines, he said, will be used in all dark spots in T&T.

How­ev­er, he said cit­i­zens must al­so do their part to pre­vent ac­ci­dents.

“But no mat­ter what we put in place, there is some lev­el of re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for the users of the road net­work be­cause we can do as much as we can, but we can­not pre­vent ac­ci­dents. Pre­vent­ing ac­ci­dents is a two-way street. We have to en­sure that the in­fra­struc­ture is up to stan­dard but dri­vers al­so have a re­spon­si­bil­i­ty,” he added.

The Min­is­ter said there are plans to con­tin­ue the high­way at a lat­er date which will elim­i­nate the round­about com­plete­ly.