Sascha Wil­son

Se­nior Re­porter

sascha.wil­son@guardian.co.tt

The Min­istry of Works and Trans­port has start­ed re­pair works on five ma­jor breach­es along the banks of the New Cut Chan­nel Riv­er in South Trinidad at a cost of $10-$12 mil­lion.

Works and Trans­port Min­is­ter Ro­han Sinanan re­vealed this yes­ter­day at the min­istry’s Drainage Di­vi­sion Tul­sa Trace pump site in Pe­nal.

Sinanan al­so planned to vis­it ar­eas in Erin, La Brea and Ce­dros yes­ter­day, but res­i­dents who gath­ered at the river­bank in Wood­land were dis­ap­point­ed he did not vis­it them.

In an in­ter­view with re­porters, Sinanan re­called that the breach­es on the river­bank oc­curred fol­low­ing re­cent heavy rain­fall.

“We did promise the res­i­dents once we find the en­gi­neer­ing so­lu­tion to it, we will start, and this morn­ing, af­ter the ten­der process and af­ter the eval­u­a­tion, the con­trac­tor has mo­bilised to start to at­tend to five of the ma­jor breach­es on the river­banks,” Sinanan said.

This came days af­ter res­i­dents and com­mu­ni­ty groups built a tyre bar­ri­er to block a breach site along the river­bank in Wood­land.

“We did ask the res­i­dents to sort of de­sist from us­ing these tyres and so on and these tem­po­rary things that we know will not hold out, but thank­ful­ly this morn­ing, we are able to start the project to re­pair the ar­eas on the banks that would have been breached,” Sinanan said.

Asked if the min­istry would be break­ing down the tyre bar­ri­er, he said the min­istry’s ac­tions are lim­it­ed and their fo­cus is on fix­ing the breach­es.

“We are ask­ing every­one to work along with us. We do have the in­ter­est of all the res­i­dents. We have to work with­in the law, one, and two, do things that is sus­tain­able,” he ad­vised.

He as­sured that if oth­er breach­es are de­tect­ed while the work is on­go­ing, they will al­so be re­paired “rather than wait for some­thing to hap­pen.”

Es­ti­mat­ing that the project might be com­plet­ed in “just over a month,” he said the chal­lenge was to find a way to get the ma­te­r­i­al to the bank, since there are no ac­cess roads to the com­pro­mised ar­eas.

Com­ment­ing on com­plaints that works should have been done in the dry sea­son, the Min­is­ter said the min­istry be­gan an ag­gres­sive drainage and paving pro­gramme at the be­gin­ning of Jan­u­ary. Sinanan said they ini­tial­ly ear­marked 500 projects in the drainage pro­gramme, which had in­creased to 524, and they are way ahead of their 2022/2023 pro­gramme.

Ex­plain­ing that a lot of tech­ni­cal work is in­volved, he said peo­ple of­ten say the min­istry should clean the en­tire length of a riv­er, but to clean and re­build a river­bank would be equiv­a­lent to their drainage bud­get for three years.

“So, we have to pri­ori­tise ar­eas,” he ex­plained.

He said they are al­so up­grad­ing pump sites and flood gates with mod­ern in­fra­struc­ture in the coun­try.

While the min­istry does its part, he said cit­i­zens ought to be ed­u­cat­ed on how they can help mit­i­gate flood­ing.

Not­ing that coun­tries with the most mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy are al­so ex­pe­ri­enc­ing flood­ing, he said Trinidad would not be spared.

As for the ad­vice from the pub­lic on flood­ing so­lu­tions, he said, “I don’t know where these ideas come from but I think if they find them­selves in my shoes one day and they un­der­stand how it op­er­ates, they will re­alise these pie in the sky so­lu­tions are nice dreams but get­ting in in­to re­al­i­ty takes some do­ing.”

He said the min­istry has been paving roads in the coun­try every day and every night.

“All can­not be done at the same time be­cause we are work­ing with a pro­gramme and we are work­ing on a bud­get, but the idea is to repave every sin­gle road in this coun­try on a pro­gramme and a phase ba­sis,” he ex­plained.

Mean­while, South Oropouche River­ine Flood Ac­tion Group pres­i­dent Ed­ward Mood­ie told Guardian Me­dia over 50 Wood­land res­i­dents were wait­ing for Sinanan.

“We saw a lot of equip­ment come down last night, some went down Tul­sa Trace, and the guys were in­struct­ed to clear the bank un­til the team from the min­istry come down. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, they found out we were here, they nev­er showed up. We even had lunch pre­pared for them,” said Mood­ie.

While the equip­ment was on site, Mood­ie was not con­fi­dent the work would be done prop­er­ly and all the breach­es ad­dressed.

“The sit­u­a­tion that we face to­day is that the breach­es are go­ing to con­tin­ue. We have two more big breach­es high­er up as well as nine that is about to hap­pen and a to­tal of 23 that have start­ed to fail along the river­bank,” he said.

Warn­ing of dev­as­tat­ing con­se­quences for the com­mu­ni­ty, he said, “If we get rain­fall for more than two days, the peo­ple of Wood­land would have to run for their lives. This is a dis­as­ter wait­ing to hap­pen.”

On Mon­day, Mood­ie, oth­er com­mu­ni­ty groups and res­i­dents had built a 40-foot tyre bar­ri­er along the bank in an at­tempt to block the riv­er from spilling in­to the com­mu­ni­ty.