Jesse Ramdeo

The man­age­ment of Five Is­lands Wa­ter and Amuse­ment Park is ques­tion­ing why the es­tab­lish­ment has not been giv­en the green light to re­sume op­er­a­tions af­ter in­vest­ing heav­i­ly in tools to ob­serve all COVID- 19 health pro­to­cols.

Fol­low­ing the fall­out, hun­dreds have been left un­em­ployed and now an un­cer­tain­ty looms over the fu­ture of the busi­ness.

For the past sev­er­al months there has been no splash of ac­tiv­i­ty at the pop­u­lar hub for wa­ter lovers in Ch­aguara­mas de­spite man­age­ment’s best ef­forts to not on­ly com­ply but ex­ceed COVID- 19 pro­to­cols.

Dur­ing an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, di­rec­tor Richard Smith stressed that all steps were tak­en to safe­guard pa­trons.

“When you en­ter every­one is tem­per­a­ture checked twice, with the hand ma­chine and then we have the ther­mal tem­per­a­ture check which records your face which can con­tact trace with our 200 CCTV cam­eras through­out, at the wash basin sinks we have re­moved the lever in­stead of us­ing your hands its now a foot pedestal,” he said.

While the Five Is­lands Wa­ter and Amuse­ment Park has been brought to a stand­still, hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars have been in­ject­ed to meet the re­quire­ments in hopes that busi­ness would re­sume, but it’s a hope di­rec­tor Smith said fades with every pass­ing day.

He said, “Three of­fi­cials from the min­istry of health vis­it­ed the park and they were very im­pressed with our pro­to­cols and every­thing we had in place, af­ter the vis­it they made a few rec­om­men­da­tions, all of which we im­ple­ment­ed and we are say­ing from De­cem­ber 11 to now there has been no com­mu­ni­ca­tion to us, we are ready to open, we want to open and we don’t see any log­i­cal rea­son as to why we can’t open.”

Ac­cord­ing to Smith, not be­ing able to gen­er­ate rev­enue has led to the painful de­ci­sion of part­ing with em­ploy­ees, “I think it has im­pact­ed over 400 em­ploy­ees and their fam­i­lies of course be­cause it’s not just them im­pact­ed.”

Smith is now call­ing on Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh to re­vis­it the reg­u­la­tions and ex­tend a life­line to wa­ter parks that have im­ple­ment­ed mea­sures to ad­dress COVID- 19 con­cerns.

“We can op­er­ate in a con­trolled man­ner and I am not say­ing to close the beach­es be­cause peo­ple need to re­lax but they need to do it in a con­trolled and dis­ci­plined man­ner which will al­low things to be more opened up over time, what we are say­ing are parks needs to re­open at re­duced ca­pac­i­ty with all pro­to­cols in place.”

Un­der the cur­rent Pub­lic Health Reg­u­la­tions, it is con­sid­ered an of­fence to op­er­ate a wa­ter park or amuse­ment park.