RAD­HI­CA DE SIL­VA

rad­hi­ca.sookraj@guardian.co.tt

With land slip­pages oc­cur­ring across var­i­ous parts of south Trinidad and al­so in To­ba­go, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley is promis­ing mass road­works as soon as the rainy sea­son is over.

Speak­ing at the PNM Women’s League held at Achie­vors Ban­quet Hall, in San Fer­nan­do, on Sun­day af­ter­noon, Row­ley said the Gov­ern­ment is bor­row­ing “a sig­nif­i­cant amount from the An­dean Bank” to as­sist with road in­fra­struc­ture.

The Prime Min­is­ter al­so sought to ex­plain why the road in­fra­struc­ture was col­laps­ing all around the coun­try, ad­mit­ting that road main­te­nance had not been a pri­or­i­ty over the past few years.

“When we gave pri­or­i­ty to our life and limb, and our econ­o­my, we ne­glect­ed- be­cause we didn’t have the re­sources- the road main­te­nance pro­gramme,” he said.

He ex­plained, “Road main­te­nance pro­gramme was not out front as it should have been. Now we are mov­ing on to that and then we dis­cov­ered that Lake As­phalt isn’t pro­duc­ing any­thing mar­ketable from the lake. It was sur­viv­ing large­ly by be­ing a bi­tu­men sell­er from the Petrotrin Re­fin­ery.”

Row­ley said Lake As­phalt had been re­ly­ing on the Petrotrin Re­fin­ery to be a com­pa­ny.

“The re­fin­ery is no longer there in the Petrotrin re­struc­tur­ing but Lake As­phalt could be there and so we fixed that,’ he said.

He ex­plained that re­cent­ly the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance made mon­ey avail­able to Lake As­phalt to cre­ate a prod­uct for road works.

“Lake As­phalt will use some im­port­ed bi­tu­men with some ma­te­r­i­al from the lake, cre­at­ing a prod­uct of good enough qual­i­ty to sup­port the road re­in­state­ment pro­gramme that we are em­bark­ing up­on,” he said.

He promised, “So as soon as these rains stop falling be­cause you know, you can’t pave roads and you can’t do road­work when it is rain­ing … As soon as the rain stops falling, you will see sig­nif­i­cant ac­tiv­i­ty with re­spect to road re­in­state­ment.”

Us­ing his ex­pe­ri­ence as a ge­ol­o­gist, Row­ley al­so ex­plained why the lands were slip­ping.

“I can tell you as a ge­ol­o­gist, this con­sis­tent rain­fall that we’ve had in the last few months, or most of this year, south Trinidad has been soft­ened. Be­cause south Trinidad is large­ly clay... of all dif­fer­ent kinds of clays. So as you add wa­ter and add wa­ter con­sis­tent­ly to clay, the clay gets soft, their en­gi­neer­ing qual­i­ty is re­moved and end­less land­slides oc­cur,” he said.

He not­ed that it is not just south Trinidad that was col­laps­ing but al­so the North Coast Road be­tween To­ba­go and Bloody Bay.

Over the past few months, land­slips have de­vel­oped along Pe­nal Rock Road, Wil­son Road, Pe­nal, Guayagu­yare, Guaracara Tabaquite Road as well as var­i­ous parts of Moru­ga, Princes Town and Bar­rack­pore.

Slip­pages along the South­ern Main Road at Chatham and Ce­dros have threat­ened to cut off hun­dreds of peo­ple from the south­west­ern penin­su­la.