Sto­ry by SHAS­TRI BOODAN

With rainy sea­son right around the cor­ner, the Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment for Cou­va North, Ra­mona Ram­di­al, is warn­ing that flood­ing will plague her con­stituen­cy again this year, un­less two ma­jor wa­ter­cours­es are cleared of de­bris.

Speak­ing with the me­dia on Tues­day at her Con­stituen­cy of­fices at Chase Vil­lage, Ram­di­al said she has plead­ed with Works and In­fra­struc­ture Min­is­ter Sen­a­tor Ro­han Sinanan to have both the Di­ana and Hon­da Rivers cleared.

The Cou­va North MP told Guardian Me­dia that de­spite nu­mer­ous re­quests to the min­is­ter, noth­ing has hap­pened.

“Both rivers have not been de­silt­ed and there­fore, we an­tic­i­pate floods. I have writ­ten nu­mer­ous let­ters to the Min­is­ter of Works and Trans­port over the past year,” she states. “I iden­ti­fied the spe­cif­ic ar­eas, the out­fall drains in the dif­fer­ent ar­eas with­in the con­stituen­cy, as well as the nat­ur­al wa­ter­cours­es. I have iden­ti­fied these wa­ter­cours­es for the Min­is­ter.” 

Ra­mona Ram­di­al said the Cou­va / Tabaquite / Ta­laro Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion (CT­TRC) is un­able to un­der­take clean­ing of the rivers since the CT­TRC does not have the heavy equip­ment re­quired for the job.

In re­sponse, Min­is­ter Sinanan said that con­trary to the MP’s state­ments, the Min­istry has been work­ing on the drainage sit­u­a­tion in the con­stituen­cy.

“Works on the Hon­da Riv­er is sched­uled in our Phase 3 on the de­silt­ing pro­gramme, which would start with­in the next week,” he con­firmed to Guardian Me­dia. “Works on the Di­ana Riv­er were com­plet­ed in our Phase 1, from the Chase Vil­lage Tri­an­gle to the Je­ho­vah Wit­ness King­dom Hall.”

He added: “There is al­so a con­struc­tion project to com­plete walling and paving on the Di­ana Riv­er. Phase 1 was done back in 2014, and we are con­tin­u­ing from where it stopped. This project is down­stream of the tri­an­gle for an ap­prox­i­mate dis­tance of 270 me­ters. It is in the vicin­i­ty of Bagna Trace Ex­ten­sion. The con­struc­tion work start­ed in Jan­u­ary this year and is ap­prox­i­mate­ly 75 per­cent com­plet­ed. It's is walling on both sides of the chan­nel and paving the in­vert,” the min­is­ter said.

The Cou­va North MP al­so told Guardian Me­dia that she has been bom­bard­ed with calls from per­sons who are still await­ing salary and rental as­sis­tance grants from the Min­istry of So­cial De­vel­op­ment and Fam­i­ly Ser­vices.

Ra­mona Ram­di­al said she and lo­cal gov­ern­ment coun­cil­lors are work­ing to source ham­pers from the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty for those per­sons most af­fect­ed by the COVID-19 cri­sis.