Lee An­na Ma­haraj

leean­na.ma­haraj@guardian.co.tt

May­or of Port-of-Spain, Joel Mar­tinez, is urg­ing the per­pe­tra­tors who stole the flap gate in the St. Ann’s Riv­er to re­turn it. He called the act an ap­palling one that will en­dan­ger the city.

“It is re­al­ly no­to­ri­ous when you think about it, so I ap­peal to the peo­ple who re­moved it to re­place it, to give it back be­cause it’s a $200,000 item and the city needs to have it re­in­stalled so that we can pro­tect the city when we have heavy rain­falls,” Mar­tinez plead­ed.

Speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia on Wednes­day, Mar­tinez said this is some­thing that will put lives at risk dur­ing the in­clement weath­er, which has re­cent­ly caused cat­a­stroph­ic flood­ing.

“The dis­tress that it’s go­ing to put the av­er­age cit­i­zen that lives around that area un­der, it is re­al­ly ridicu­lous and I can’t be­lieve that some­one will steal an item like that, which in­volves the safe­ty of the city and the safe­ty of the peo­ple who live around there and the dis­tress that it would put the city un­der,” he added.

He ref­er­enced the re­cent van­dal­iza­tion of wa­ter pumps in the same area and said in­ci­dents like this hin­der the de­vel­op­ment of the city.

“These are the things that we take years to work to­wards to en­sure that the city is in a bet­ter place. Every time rain falls peo­ple are dis­tressed, and the min­istry of works and the city work to­geth­er to try and al­le­vi­ate as much as pos­si­ble flood­ing, as much as we can get, and the thing is to have peo­ple do this, to van­dalise in such a way, it is un­be­liev­able,” Mar­tinez said.

On Tues­day, a flood­gate weigh­ing ap­prox­i­mate­ly one ton was stolen from the St. Ann’s Riv­er in Port-of-Spain. Min­is­ter of Works and Trans­port, Ro­han Sinanan, who was on the scene, said this will cause chaos for the city. Act­ing Di­rec­tor of Drainage Kather­ine Bad­loo-Do­er­ga was al­so present and said with this gate miss­ing, ar­eas such as the Beetham High­way, the Cen­tral Mar­ket, and Pica­dil­ly can be flood­ed eas­i­ly with heavy rain­fall.