San­gre Grande Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion chair­man, Anil Juter­am says a rup­tured WASA pipeline is to blame for a land­slide that de­stroyed a road­way, cut­ting off al­most 1,000 peo­ple in San­gre Grande.

Yes­ter­day, Juter­am said re­me­di­al works had start­ed along the North Oropouche Main Road, San­gre Grande and one lane has been re­opened for ve­hic­u­lar traf­fic, al­low­ing the res­i­dents of Fish­ing Pond and oth­er com­mu­ni­ties to get to and from their homes.

Juter­am said the land­slip start­ed sev­er­al months ago and has been wors­en­ing since.

“It start­ed up small maybe about six months ago, but the au­thor­i­ties, they al­lowed it to get big­ger and big­ger, there was a bam­boo stool then some­one re­moved the bam­boo stool. So that caused fur­ther slip­page of the banks, bam­boo would have kept it to­geth­er, there­fore, keep­ing the sta­bil­i­ty of the road, but with in­clement weath­er, the rain and mov­ing to and from with big ve­hi­cles, all of that caused the land to re­al­ly move,” Juter­am said.

He said res­i­dents were frus­trat­ed, as they com­plained about their plight be­ing ig­nored by the Min­istry of Works and Trans­port.

“They are frus­trat­ed be­cause it’s not on­ly there, there is a part of Fish­ing Pond where there has been a land­slide for over two years and noth­ing is be­ing done. They just com­ing and putting ma­te­r­i­al but the source of the prob­lem, the move­ment of the land, they are not ad­dress­ing those things,” he said.

Juter­am said the af­fect­ed roads fall un­der the Min­istry of Works and Trans­port but as head of the Cor­po­ra­tion, he does what­ev­er he can to as­sist in re­pair­ing the roads.

He said the San­gre Grande of­fice of the Works Min­istry does not have the nec­es­sary equip­ment or ma­te­r­i­al to car­ry out the re­pairs.

“Its no fault of the work­ers in San­gre Grande, every­thing is done in Port-of-Spain and I don’t know, they just don’t give pri­or­i­ty to coun­try ar­eas, if it was any place in Port-of-Spain, Mar­aval, Mara­cas, Wright­son Road, they would deal with it right away but in these ar­eas, they wait un­til some­thing dras­tic hap­pens be­fore they act,” he said.

Juter­am said while those who live in the area were not the type to protest for bet­ter con­di­tions, he be­lieves they are en­ti­tled to have prop­er roads in their com­mu­ni­ty.

Last month WASA re­paired a rup­tured main ahead of sched­ule, which had left res­i­dents of San­gre Grande and en­vi­rons with­out wa­ter for a few days.