Rad­hi­ca Sookraj

One day af­ter a storm caused hav­oc in south Trinidad, a sink­hole ap­peared at Scott Street, San Fer­nan­do, caus­ing dis­tress to hun­dreds of dri­vers. The sink hole, which mea­sured about ten feet deep and five feet across, is said to be widen­ing grad­u­al­ly. It was first spot­ted around 6 am. How­ev­er, by mid­day crews from the Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty, T&TEC, city en­gi­neers and con­trac­tors were on site mak­ing as­sess­ments. Res­i­dents said it was the third time in sev­er­al months that a sink­hole had ap­peared on Scott Street, one of the main ar­ter­ies lead­ing in and out of the south city. The pre­vi­ous sink­holes were caused by a col­lapse of un­der­ground in­fra­struc­ture.

Speak­ing at the site yes­ter­day, San Fer­nan­do may­or Dr Navi Mu­radali said an as­sess­ment must be done by pro­fes­sion­al en­gi­neers to de­ter­mine why sink­holes were sud­den­ly ap­pear­ing at cer­tain parts of the coun­try. Mak­ing ref­er­ence to the Sea Lots sink­hole, which de­vel­oped along the Beetham High­way on Sep­tem­ber 5, Mu­radali said: "We need to find out what is caus­ing these sink­holes to ap­pear." He added that the San Fer­nan­do City Cor­po­ra­tion was li­ais­ing close­ly with the Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty and the T&T Elec­tric­i­ty Com­mis­sion to de­ter­mine what caused Scott Street to col­lapse. "We have to get this prob­lem rec­ti­fied as soon as pos­si­ble be­cause this is a main artery of the city. Both T&TEC and WASA have lines un­der the road."

Mu­radali ex­plained that the SFCC would as­sume re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to fix the sink­hole. He said many bus­es and cars leav­ing Good­ing Vil­lage from Gulf City use this road to ex­it on­to the high­way. "There­fore it will be an in­con­ve­nience to hun­dreds of peo­ple who use this road. We are now here with the city en­gi­neer's de­part­ment, and they are do­ing an as­sess­ment. "I ex­pect this will take a few days to be fixed but we have to wait and see un­til the of­fi­cial re­port from the en­gi­neers comes in," Mu­radali added. He said his teams would work night and day to have the mat­ter cor­rect­ed. Mean­while sev­er­al busi­ness own­ers said in­ter­na­tion­al en­gi­neers should be con­sult­ed to rec­ti­fy the prob­lem as lo­cal en­gi­neers had failed to do so.