East Bank Demerara residents have raised concerns about the inconvenience and danger which two bridges, currently under construction, have posed to their lives in recent months.
These construction sites have been constant sources of vehicular accidents, one of which has been fatal, and little is being done to ensure that traffic flow is regulated there at all times, residents say.
Several efforts made to contact Traffic Chief Neil Semple for a comment were futile.
The first bridge is being constructed at Diamond and the other at Soesdyke. These projects, according to residents, have been ongoing for almost two months.
“In all fairness,” a Diamond resident told this newspaper yesterday, “the recent rainy weather has delayed their works…but it also appears as though these people don’t have the sense to avoid having their works coincide with the rainy season.”
Construction workers, according to Diamond residents, have completed working on the eastern side of the bridge. When Stabroek News visited the location work was being carried out on the western side. The western section of the bridge appears to be a larger area than the eastern side which has been completed and, based on its state, does not look as if it will be finished any time soon.
Motorists must drive along a narrow stretch of bumpy road to get past the construction site at Diamond. A resident who lives a short distance from the bridge said that within the last month they have counted seven “jam ups”.
The most recent, they said, occurred last Thursday night. A motor car, they recalled, was moving along the eastern carriageway and collided with another car which had been moving along the western carriageway before moving to the single lane to get past the bridge.
“I think the problem those cars had was seeing each other in time and if they were driving carefully then the incident would not have happened,” the resident said. “But I’ll tell you something though if those cars were speeding then we would’ve had a real, real smash up.”
While motorists are expected to approach any construction site with caution, residents said, it is a fact that many do not. This reluctance to adhere to the traffic regulations, residents noted, is exactly why the single lane at the bridge should be monitored at all times.
Traffic build up on weekday mornings has also become a problem for persons living in villages beyond Diamond. Between 7.30 am and 9 am in the morning traffic crawls and it take more than 30 minutes to get past the bridge at Diamond.
“We are not complaining that they are improving the bridge,” another Diamond resident stressed, “because it was narrow before…like a year and a half ago there was a horrible accident here and two young men die…they were speeding and the bridge was narrow and they slammed right into on of the bridge rails.”
The accident to which the resident referred was the fiery smash-up which left two friends dead early on the morning of August 5, 2008. Satyanand Singh and Wajeed Shaw died after their vehicle slammed into the bridge’s concrete culvert. It was shortly after this that residents insisted the bridge be widened.
Meanwhile, the construction site at Soesdyke has already claimed a life. Clayton Marshall was struck down by a truck, which was reportedly speeding, near that bridge last Saturday night.
Soesdyke residents, like those in Diamond, have raised similar complaints and had said that because the road is the only one which leads to the Cheddi Jagan International Airport, Timehri it is often busy. The lack of full-time traffic police at the location has resulted in reckless motorists speeding by the single lane open to traffic along the western side of the bridge.
