Jesse Ramdeo

What was once a road­way along Sobo Ex­ten­sion Trace, La Brea has now be­come a path rid­dled with cracks.

On Fri­day, res­i­dents told Guardian Me­dia that al­most two months ago, they ob­served frac­tures de­vel­op­ing along the road’s sur­face with con­di­tions quick­ly wors­en­ing when a Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA) wa­ter line be­gan leak­ing.

Ac­cord­ing to res­i­dent Mo­han Hitram, the cracks have since deep­ened con­sid­er­ably.

“Ba­si­cal­ly, it is a rup­tured wa­ter line, a WASA line. It start­ed with a con­nec­tion and from that with the wa­ter hav­ing nowhere to go it caused the land to shift. It re­al bad now.”

Hitram ex­plained that af­ter be­ing alert­ed, WASA locked off sup­ply and while the res­i­dents claimed it had less­ened the land move­ment, they say they are now with­out wa­ter.

Hitram stat­ed that af­ter the is­sue was raised, there were no in­fra­struc­tur­al works to ad­dress the col­laps­ing road.

Ac­cord­ing to him, con­di­tions have since wors­ened to a point where vil­lagers and mo­torists were at risk.

He stat­ed, “Cars can’t pass, we have kids go­ing to school, peo­ple have to go to work. If you no­tice, it has some places the ve­hi­cles and them un­der car­riage touch and grad­ing off, it drop re­al­ly bad.”

Wheel­chair-bound Cha­nar­dai Ra­mai, 62, lament­ed that her health had been tak­ing a hit due to the on­go­ing is­sue.

“I does have to go to the La Brea health cen­tre.

“If my hus­band not home I does have to call some­body to car­ry me but with the road bad so they don’t want to come,” she ex­plained.

With over 200 res­i­dents im­pact­ed, ac­tivist Vic­tor Roberts said it was this in­ac­ces­si­bil­i­ty which pos­es the great­est threat.

He said, “If an am­bu­lance or even a fire break out in this area, how would you get the ap­pli­ances to come to the res­cue the peo­ple.

“Stephen Mc Clashie be­ing the Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment for the area, I am dis­ap­point­ed that some­thing like this is hap­pen­ing in his con­stituen­cy and even though this was high­light­ed on so­cial me­dia and oth­er plat­forms we have not seen him and oth­er rep­re­sen­ta­tives here.”

Guardian Me­dia con­tact­ed a se­nior of­fi­cial at WASA who con­firmed that the mat­ter would be looked in­to.