The first one was days before Christmas 2009. Thaddius Samuels, a four-year-old described as chatty and energetic, died in a septic tank on December 21 last year. Reports were that he was playing in the yard when he went missing and after a concerted search by relatives was found inside the septic tank on the property at South Better Hope, East Coast Demerara. It emerged that the septic tank had a makeshift cover which clearly made it unsafe.
Less than a month later, on January 16, the same fate befell one-year old Nicholas Ramnauth of Kaneville, East Bank Demerara. Described as a child who brought lots of joy to his family, Ramnauth was reported to have been playing in the yard with older children when he suddenly disappeared. A frantic search ensued and he was then found in the septic tank. Efforts to revive him failed and he was subsequently pronounced dead at the Diamond Diagnostic Centre. Again, it was revealed that the septic tank on this property had a makeshift cover; it was unsafe.
From Kaneville to Better Hope and beyond, in the city, along the West Coast and West Bank Demerara, in Berbice and in Essequibo people have been building homes with indoor plumbing and installing septic tanks. No doubt some are being built right at this moment. One would hope that the majority of these waste collectors are being built and finished, that is, with the correct heavy lid installed, which no ordinary human could easily remove – let alone a child. This obviously was not the case in Kaneville and Better Hope and it proved to be detrimental.
The Ministry of Housing has been exceedingly chuffed with its house-lots programme. It has churned out figures of how many house lots have been distributed each year and how many houses have been built. It has been racing on with opening up new housing schemes and regularizing or removing squatter settlements and designating approved places for squatters to live. In these new schemes the infrastructure is done by the government and it consists of putting in a few roads – in some cases these are not properly paved – installing electricity where possible and pipelines for running water to a point. The numbers look good in reports; they convey the impression that progress is being made and the country is being developed.
However, in reality, as this column has said before, houses are being built with the use of unskilled labour and substandard materials in order to cut costs, because while many people would like to own their own homes, few can actually afford it. Many of the new house-lot lottery winners are low-income earners or single parents. Some sacrifice quality in order to stretch their mortgage dollars in the face of the ever rising cost of building supplies, and they manage to do this because there is no proper monitoring being done with regard to safety issues in the building of these houses.
A case in point was the death on January 8 of one-year-old Miguel Samuels of Linden. It was reported that the infant was playing with older children on a concrete verandah when one of its walls collapsed on him crushing him to death.
Some years ago there was a litany of complaints aired after a developer built houses in a new scheme on the East Bank Demerara and sold them to persons who shortly after found that because of substandard work or substandard materials, the walls of their new houses were cracking. Previously, this was also the case with another developer who was building homes in a new scheme on the East Coast Demerara.
If homes are being shoddily built, then what of septic tanks? The deaths of Thaddius Samuels and Nicholas Ramnauth have partly answered this question. We know that septic tanks are being built without lids. But what of the tanks? Are they being dug to the correct depth? Is the concrete mix of the required standard? Or is it substandard so that leaching of the sewage into the environment is allowed? And what future disaster one wonders will shed light on this?
This column has said before and maintains that moving people from squatter shacks into unsafe housing situations is not progress. Truly subsidized housing for low-income earners would entail government perhaps using grant aid, building sturdy apartments, range-type houses or condominiums with proper infrastructure which includes, roads, power, plumbing, and offering them for lease at subsidized rates. This should be the way forward. At the very least, what it can do right now is institute monitoring in the building of houses and secondary infrastructure, particularly septic tanks, in housing schemes. No more children should die through these acts of carelessness.
