Region 10 Chairman Mortimer Mingo says three recently-constructed roads under the Central Housing and Planning Authority (CH&PA) in Linden are under threat of erosion owing to the lack of accompanying drainage.
And residents in the communities where the roads were built are calling the road works “substandard.”
Linden is under the management of an Interim Management Committee, whose chairman is Orin Gordon. Gordon could not be reached for a comment on this issue. The CH&PA does not respond to queries from Stabroek News on matters of this type.
In a recent interview Mingo related that due to concerns about erosion the region has always advised that given the topography of Linden road construction should be accompanied by concrete drains to take off the surface water from the roads.
Because the three roads in question – Buck Hill, Canvas City and Green Valley – which are all on the Wismar shore, were constructed without concrete drains, but with sand drains as in the case of the Green Valley road, the chairman says that signs of erosion are evident.
Some $44M was allotted for road works in Region 10 last year, according to the region. There was a $9M sum under the re-current budget, together with the $25M budgeted for last year. Mingo said that this sum was not adequate for road maintenance in the region.
Speaking about the three roads, he told Stabroek News that the region had observed that road works were being carried out in the three communities, but the region had not been informed before hand.
The region also enquired, he said, about the contractor for the roads at its statutory meeting in November, but no information was forthcoming at that time. Mingo learnt recently that the works were being conducted by the CH&PA. “I still do not know who is the contractor,” he said, at the time of the interview.
Mingo explained that since the region was not informed about the works the scope and specifications of the contracts are not known nor the cost of the works. It was pointed out, however, that there are some agencies that have done work in the region and the Regional Democratic Council was informed and the necessary documentation supplied, so that the works could have been monitored in keeping with the documentation.
The chairman stated that in his view the type of materials used to build the roads was not “suitable” for such construction in that region. Normally, materials used in the region for road construction are bauxite capping or laterite, and then a mixture of sand and laterite for base materials. But in the case of these three roads, overburden (the top soil of the bauxite) was used as the base.
Rigors
He warned that these roads will not stand up to the rigors of the traffic. The region also highlighted the issue of erosion through a letter to Agriculture Minister Robert Persaud. When contacted this week, Persaud told Stabroek News that he had forwarded the letter to the Ministry of Public Works. Persaud also said that the ministry has done some drainage intervention in the region but in relation to agricultural lands.
Apart from these three roads this newspaper has also observed that roads currently under construction in South Amelia’s Ward are also being built without any drains. Already the base of the South Amelia’s Ward road, which is yet to be tarred, has large cracks.
In an interview last week, one Green Valley resident of over 40 years who asked not to be named described the works as “substandard,” noting that the roads constructed back in November took a couple of days.
Among the equipment used to build the road, according to this resident, were a back-hoe to dig and refill the overburden and a grader, since certain parts of the previous sand track built by residents were removed.
The man also noted that the overburden was rolled with a roller and tar was applied with some stones, and in less than one week the road was completed. According to this resident, the contractor of the Green Valley road is based in Mahaicony.
“We expected that they would have put drains so as to maintain (the roads)
