Raphael John-Lall

raphael.lall@guardian.co.tt

The floods that wreaked hav­oc on the coun­try’s in­fra­struc­ture and cost tax­pay­ers mil­lions of dol­lars over the last few months have raised de­bate about the qual­i­ty of work that has been done by the Min­istry of Works and Trans­port and con­trac­tors.

An ex­am­ple is the Man­zanil­la-Ma­yaro Road which was se­vere­ly dam­aged in No­vem­ber, eight years af­ter the Min­istry of Works and Trans­port spent $30 to $40 mil­lion to re­pair the dam­age done at that time due to struc­tur­al breach­es that oc­curred as a re­sult of in­clement weath­er.

Dr Kiran Tota-Maharaj

UK-based, Trinidad-born char­tered en­gi­neer and aca­d­e­m­ic Dr Ki­ran To­ta-Ma­haraj, who chaired a con­fer­ence on wa­ter man­age­ment at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, St Au­gus­tine, last week, told the Sun­day Guardian that peo­ple or com­pa­nies who get state con­tracts should have those projects mon­i­tored in­de­pen­dent­ly by pro­fes­sion­al as­so­ci­a­tions to pre­vent cor­rup­tion and waste of tax­pay­ers’ mon­ey.

Pres­i­dent of the As­so­ci­a­tion of Pro­fes­sion­al En­gi­neers of T&T (APETT) Dr Chris Ma­haraj agreed with To­ta-Ma­haraj, say­ing that APETT has over 1,000 mem­bers, and they are will­ing to as­sist the Gov­ern­ment and con­trac­tors who un­der­take pub­lic in­fra­struc­ture work in en­sur­ing that qual­i­ty work is done with­in time.

"I agree that when you are deal­ing with any large con­tracts, mul­ti-mil­lion dol­lar con­tracts, es­pe­cial­ly pub­lic in­fra­struc­ture, there is al­ways a need for a third par­ty as an over­sight mech­a­nism like a pro­fes­sion­al as­so­ci­a­tion. You have the Gov­ern­ment that has its wish, You have the con­trac­tor that wants to do the job at the low­est price pos­si­ble to gen­er­ate more prof­its. Of course, that’s un­der­stand­able as they are run­ning a busi­ness," he said.

But Ma­haraj be­lieves there needs to be "an un­bi­ased en­ti­ty that should be there to en­sure the con­trac­tor car­ries out qual­i­ty and stan­dard­ised work." He said there aren’t spe­cial­ists to have that over­sight at times with­in gov­ern­ment in­sti­tu­tions. "That’s where as­so­ci­a­tions like APETT come in as an over­sight mech­a­nism, es­pe­cial­ly when pub­lic mon­ey is spent.”

Com­ment­ing on con­trac­tors do­ing work for the Gov­ern­ment that has to be cor­rect­ed or up­grad­ed soon af­ter, Ma­haraj said, "There are stan­dards for en­gi­neer­ing struc­tures in the in­dus­try. There are stan­dards for drainage, stan­dards for roads. When some­thing goes wrong, a lot of fac­tors come in­to play. Was the right ma­te­r­i­al used? Was the right process used? There are oth­er fac­tors that are com­ing in­to play like cli­mate change."

He blamed the flood­ing on cli­mate change but al­so on man-made caus­es.

"Un­til a full root-cause analy­sis is done, we would not know all the fac­tors in­volved in that Man­zanil­la road and stretch. There’s the ef­fect of cli­mate change that ex­ac­er­bates the in­ten­si­ty, du­ra­tion and fre­quen­cy of rain­fall. We are see­ing the ef­fects of cli­mate change, but we need to re­fer to da­ta to con­firm to say in the last four or five years there has been an in­crease in rain­fall. When peo­ple do things un­law­ful­ly, when a per­son di­verts a riv­er flow in­to his es­tate for agri­cul­ture pur­pos­es, and al­so il­le­gal quar­ry­ing," Ma­haraj said.

To counter prob­lems of flood­ing and oth­er chal­lenges like poor work done, he pro­posed stake­hold­ers work­ing to­geth­er which in­clude acad­e­mia, the Gov­ern­ment and in­dus­tries to get the best out­comes.

"We need to have more co-op­er­a­tion. The pub­lic needs to get in­volved to make sure that the so­lu­tions that these three en­ti­ties ar­rive at are ben­e­fi­cial."

Al­though de­clin­ing to give spe­cif­ic ex­am­ples, he said there was al­ways "room for im­prove­ment" in the pub­lic work that the Gov­ern­ment car­ries out like roads, drainage and bridges.

“We are not the on­ly coun­try to in­cur cost over­runs. It’s not some­thing unique to T&T. We have the com­ing pro­cure­ment leg­is­la­tion that will as­sist in this area and the Gov­ern­ment can re­ly on pro­fes­sion­al as­so­ci­a­tions like APETT."

Dr Maya Trotz, Professor of Civil Engineering, University of South Florida.

Plan­ning de­vel­op­ment is crit­i­cal

Pro­fes­sor of Civ­il En­vi­ron­men­tal En­gi­neer­ing at the Uni­ver­si­ty of South Flori­da, Maya Trotz, who took part in the wa­ter man­age­ment con­fer­ence at UWI last week, told the Sun­day Guardian that al­though she is a for­eign­er, based on what she has seen and heard, there need to be bet­ter-planned de­vel­op­ments that do not hin­der wa­ter­ways when it rains heav­i­ly and in­evitably floods.

"It’s not just de­vel­op­ing coun­tries, as we in Flori­da are build­ing on the wet­lands like nev­er be­fore. There must be peo­ple who are aware of these is­sues and want to get in­to the de­ci­sion-mak­ing process on pol­i­cy mat­ters. They will cham­pi­on these is­sues. Al­so, the vot­ers must be aware of these is­sues and can use their votes.

"Peo­ple want larg­er hous­es, and bet­ter cities and com­mu­ni­ties, but they have to plan the spaces. Are peo­ple en­croach­ing on agri­cul­tur­al lands? Are these new ar­eas for hous­ing flood prone? They must be planned."

She list­ed sev­er­al fac­tors which con­tribute to flood­ing which in­clude cli­mate change and un­planned de­vel­op­ment.

"It’s dif­fi­cult to man­age all that wa­ter and when you lay­er on the de­vel­op­ment you are re­duc­ing ways in which wa­ter can be ab­sorbed. I think there's quite a lot of de­vel­op­ment that’s go­ing on that maybe is not pay­ing at­ten­tion to how things should work. I see it in T&T.

"There are peo­ple with yards, and they put con­crete over them. Through this, you are re­duc­ing your per­vi­ous soils and the abil­i­ty of the ware to in­fil­trate. So now, you have a lot of run-offs. If you don’t have prop­er drainage, to deal with the run-off and there’s heavy rain­fall, the run-off will help to flood your area."

She spoke about a meet­ing with so­ca artiste Col­lis Du­ran­ty who she met at a fundrais­er last week, and he told her about floods that his area in Bam­boo ex­pe­ri­enced.

"He told me that he had nev­er seen such floods be­fore. He said the wa­ter was at three feet in his apart­ment, but oth­er places got hit even worse and cars were de­stroyed. I am not say­ing there was neg­li­gence on the part of the au­thor­i­ties in this case, but he said that res­i­dents had to do their own in­ter­ven­tion."

She al­so warned about the costs in­volved when there is no prop­er plan­ning and the re­sult is flood­ing and dam­age to in­fra­struc­ture.

"It is cost­ly. If you are a busi­ness, and you are de­vel­op­ing prop­er­ty in a space that’s not safe, then you are com­pris­ing safe­ty. At some time, the in­sur­ance in­dus­try will do a push­back. Then they will start call­ing for bet­ter build­ing codes, that your roof needs to be strapped, and they can’t af­ford pay­outs.

Sinanan de­fends the work of his min­istry

Mean­while, Min­is­ter of Works and Trans­port Ro­han Sinanan, in an in­ter­view with the Sun­day Guardian two weeks ago, de­fend­ed the work that his min­istry does.

Sinanan said that al­though they have to re­turn to re­build some parts of the Man­zanil­la-Ma­yaro Road which was bad­ly dam­aged by floods, he de­nied that the work done on that road­way in 2014 was poor or that there were any ma­jor tech­ni­cal fail­ures from that time.

"What the en­gi­neers are telling me is that they need to do more de­signs and move more wa­ter out of the area. The road ac­tu­al­ly broke when the wa­ter crossed the road. Once you put wa­ter on the sand like that, the sand even­tu­al­ly chan­nels and pulls every­thing from un­der the road and that’s why the road col­lapsed. The force and ve­loc­i­ty of the wa­ter were like a riv­er cross­ing the road. It was like ten rivers."

The topog­ra­phy of the area, he said, lim­its what could be done to solve some of those prob­lems.

"Re­mem­ber, there is a lim­i­ta­tion on how much work you can do be­cause of the na­ture of the area. It is an area where you can­not do any ma­jor set of con­struc­tion like em­bank­ments. In 2014, the plan was to do some work to re­in­state the road but the rain­fall that we got now was sig­nif­i­cant­ly more than then."

He al­so said peo­ple must al­so look at the cost fac­tor in­volved.

"You could en­gi­neer for what­ev­er sit­u­a­tion, but there is a cost in­volved. You could build what you want there, but you have to look at the cost of the in­fra­struc­ture and whether you will be per­mit­ted to do some­thing like that. You could put a free­way for that en­tire road, but then you have to look at the cost. There are en­gi­neer­ing so­lu­tions to every­thing, but the cost is some­thing any Gov­ern­ment must take in­to con­sid­er­a­tion," Sinanan said.

He added that in 2014 there were four breach­es or break­aways of the road­way, while there are 16 this time and some parts are still un­der wa­ter.

"Look­ing back, one of the ma­jor chal­lenges was land ac­qui­si­tion be­cause there were a lot of lands where the breach­es were that they could not have moved in to do work on. This time we are tak­ing a lit­tle bit more time to make sure we come up with more suit­able so­lu­tions.

"We are fo­cus­ing on bring­ing back con­nec­tiv­i­ty now. We saw what hap­pened in 2014 and the en­gi­neers will come up with a so­lu­tion that bet­ters that. En­gi­neer­ing glob­al­ly is be­ing test­ed by cli­mate change, we now have to come up with bet­ter so­lu­tions."

Prof Win­ston Suite, speak­ing to the Sun­day Guardian re­cent­ly, de­scribed the

Man­zanil­la-Ma­yaro road sit­u­a­tion as a dis­as­ter wait­ing to hap­pen and said we need the best and bright­est minds to come up with a so­lu­tion for the prob­lem

Sinanan was again con­tact­ed last week for com­ments on con­cerns about con­trac­tor in­ef­fi­cien­cy in pub­lic works and cost over­runs, but he did not an­swer his phone.