Kali­fa Clyne

kali­fa.clyne@guardian.co.tt

Shift­ing land com­pound­ed by heavy rain­fall over the past week has caused a Hin­du mandir in Freeport “to col­lapse to some ex­tent”.

There was ev­i­dence of huge cracks on the wall stretch­ing from ceil­ing to floor and the walls pulled apart along lines in sev­er­al ar­eas at the Lak­sh­mi Narayan Mandir lo­cat­ed at 112 Siew­dass Road.

Fur­ther crack­ing of the struc­ture could be heard as See­ta Ma­habir, pres­i­dent of the mandir and oth­er devo­tees at­tempt­ed to re­move items from the struc­ture.

Ma­habir, dur­ing an in­ter­view with the Guardian on Sun­day, said while there had been small cracks in the walls pri­or to last week, it was on­ly af­ter con­sis­tent rain­fall two days ago that the walls start­ed shift­ing away from each oth­er, leav­ing gap­ing spaces along the build­ing.

“The build­ing has col­lapsed to some ex­tent and we have been ad­vised that it is not safe to oc­cu­py,” Ma­habir said.

“Two weeks ago there were slight cracks but fol­low­ing the rain the cracks ex­pand­ed. The ex­perts tell us there is a lev­el of land shift­ing as well as the rain­fall. We were told the rain un­der­mined the build­ing which re­sult­ed in the de­struc­tion.”

Ma­habir said the mandir, which was con­struct­ed in 2006, was used by the com­mu­ni­ty and by peo­ple from all over the coun­try and saw about 300 peo­ple at­tend ser­vice every Sun­day.

Ma­habir said next week the mandir will be de­mol­ished and devo­tees had al­ready com­mit­ted to giv­ing fi­nan­cial and tech­ni­cal as­sis­tance to have it re­built with a stronger foun­da­tion in the short­est pos­si­ble time.