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.
