KEVON FELMINE

Se­nior Re­porter

kevon.felmine@guardian.co.tt

While Clyde “The Out­law” Jem­mot was the on­ly fa­tal road ac­ci­dent oc­cur­ring on a re­cent­ly opened seg­ment of the Archibald-DeLeon High­way, the Min­istry of Works and Trans­port (MOWT) is mak­ing safe­ty up­grades to the area.

Min­is­ter of Works and Trans­port Ro­han Sinanan said when­ev­er an ac­ci­dent oc­curs at cer­tain spots of the high­way, it trig­gers a vis­it from the Traf­fic Man­age­ment Branch (TMB) to en­sure every­thing is up to stan­dard, safe­ty mea­sures are in place and de­ter­mine if there is a need for any ad­di­tion­al ac­tions. 

“They would have gone in and made some changes to en­hance the area, but at the end of the day, every­thing on the road comes down to per­son­al re­spon­si­bil­i­ty. We all have to be a lit­tle vig­i­lant on the road. We must un­der­stand that road users in­clude pedes­tri­ans, cy­clists, peo­ple op­er­at­ing their ve­hi­cles and even peo­ple cross­ing or walk­ing on the road,” Sinanan said.

Jem­mot, 56, of Mor­vant, a DJ at 96.1 WE FM was dri­ving a white Kia Rio along the high­way around 4 am on No­vem­ber 26 with Jo­hann Red­head, an an­nounc­er at Next 99.1 FM in the front pas­sen­ger seat. They ap­proached the round­about and the car flipped sev­er­al times be­fore slam­ming in­to a light pole. When Guapo po­lice ar­rived min­utes lat­er, they saw the car on its hood and the light pole on top of it. Jem­mott was ly­ing on the ground af­ter be­ing thrown out the car, while Red­head had crawled out.

Some peo­ple la­belled the area a haz­ard as there was an abrupt de­tour with­out prop­er sig­nage. How­ev­er, some res­i­dents said there was a need for more cau­tion.

Sinanan vis­it­ed the area on Mon­day and saw the en­hance­ment work tak­ing place along the high­way. He said it was the first ac­ci­dent in that area, and there were prob­a­bly 100,000 cars pass­ing there, but one got in­to an ac­ci­dent. 

He said the TMB would de­crease the en­trance to the Guapo round­about from two lanes to one to make it more clear that dri­vers should re­duce their speed. He said up­grad­ing the road net­work was on­go­ing, with a rum­ble strip in­stalled to slow down mo­torists and help wake up dri­vers who may have fall­en asleep.

“Re­mem­ber, at the end of the day, the high­ways are de­signed to in­ter­na­tion­al stan­dards and in­ter­na­tion­al codes, but from time to time, we re­alise we can go a lit­tle fur­ther to try to as­sist dri­vers.”

Sinanan said the MOWT was part­ner­ing with an in­ter­na­tion­al fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tion for a road safe­ty au­dit. It en­tails us­ing a ve­hi­cle equipped with a cam­era to dri­ve around the coun­try and iden­ti­fy haz­ards on the road.

He said it was a com­put­erised sys­tem that will tell us, “Look, this bend is a lit­tle too sharp, or this road needs ta­per­ing on this side, things like that, us­ing tech­nol­o­gy ... it is the first time we are ac­tu­al­ly do­ing any­thing like that, prob­a­bly in the Caribbean.”