Works and Trans­port Min­is­ter Ro­han Sinanan is now wor­ried for the peo­ple of East Port-of-Spain, af­ter a ma­jor flood­gate along the East Dry Riv­er was stolen.

Speak­ing to the me­dia at the Abat­toir Road/Sea Lots Pump Sta­tion yes­ter­day, where the gate was stolen from, Min­is­ter Sinanan said this could mean chaos for thou­sands of peo­ple who come in­to Port-of-Spain dai­ly and the hun­dreds who live in the area.

Act­ing Di­rec­tor of Drainage Kather­ine Bad­loo-Do­er­ga ex­plained why this is bad news for the pub­lic.

“With that flap gate miss­ing, what that now means is that the wa­ter, once the St Ann’s Riv­er ris­es, will back up to the Beetham High­way, the Cen­tral Mar­ket and Pica­dil­ly. This is the same drain that brings wa­ter out of those ar­eas and now that we don’t have a flap gate to keep the wa­ter from go­ing in, it will be a se­ri­ous prob­lem when we get heavy rains,” Bad­loo-Do­er­ga said.

Bad­loo-Do­er­ga said the theft would have been no easy feat.

“It is al­most a ton, a met­ric ton, it has to be some kind of co­or­di­nat­ed ef­fort to get that out of there,” she said, not­ing that re­plac­ing the gate will be very dif­fi­cult.

“Those things are not easy to come by, they have to be or­dered and shipped in and it takes months to get here. We now have to see if we can re­lo­cate one if we can.”

Bad­loo-Do­er­ga said it could now cost the state around $300,000 to re­place it.

Mean­while, Sinanan said this is not the first time the pump house had been van­dalised.

“To see this hap­pen­ing here is re­al­ly heart-break­ing be­cause we just did a project from Hilton all the way down chang­ing all the flap gates that cost us around $2.2 mil­lion. To come and see this now and to re­alise that if the wa­ter just ris­es in this riv­er, it is go­ing to be chaos for thou­sands of peo­ple com­ing in and out of Port-of-Spain and the peo­ple in the area.”

He said in some cas­es, the pub­lic can ac­tu­al­ly blame ban­dits and van­dals for their flood­ing woes.

“We spent about $20 mil­lion on the pump at the light­house, that pump worked per­fect­ly un­til it was van­dalised and since it was van­dalised, we have seen flood­ing again on South Quay,” he added.

Sinanan said his min­istry has been hit “very hard” by scrap iron thefts and this co­in­ci­den­tal­ly came a day af­ter mem­bers of the T&T Scrap Iron Deal­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion protest­ed out­side his home in Val­sayn.

On Mon­day, scrap iron deal­ers told Guardian Me­dia they re­ceived in­for­ma­tion that it was Min­is­ter Sinanan who lob­bied Cab­i­net to put a mora­to­ri­um on scrap iron ex­ports. The or­der will be in ef­fect un­til Feb­ru­ary 28, 2023.

How­ev­er, Sinanan said yes­ter­day that he does not have that lev­el of au­thor­i­ty. How­ev­er, he stressed he is in full sup­port of the six-month ban.

“The Min­istry has been hit very hard by scrap iron deal­ers. Re­cent­ly, we lost an en­tire build­ing that cost us around $1 mil­lion, I un­der­stand it was sold for $9,000 so I don’t know if that protest was meant to in­tim­i­date me as Min­is­ter be­cause they came to my home, if that is sup­posed to in­tim­i­date me, that I’m not sup­posed to re­port items stolen from the Min­istry, clear­ly that didn’t work be­cause we made a re­port to­day about more items be­ing stolen.”

But Sinanan said he is not link­ing yes­ter­day’s flood­gate theft to the scrap iron body, adding that since the ban came in­to ef­fect in Au­gust, this was the first in­stance of his min­istry’s re­sources be­ing stolen.

“But I have heard peo­ple say they are still los­ing things,” the min­is­ter added.