The Wa­ter and Sewage Au­thor­i­ty con­tin­ues to be one of the most stress­ful of all pub­lic util­i­ties this coun­try has to deal with and I don't be­lieve that there is any end of this in sight with­in the near fu­ture.Un­for­tu­nate­ly, this util­i­ty (just like the oth­ers) is not un­der the ju­ris­dic­tion of the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly, so it is in a po­si­tion to hold the THA to "ran­som," when­ev­er they want.I have been won­der­ing in my mind and some­times aloud, if this is re­al­ly the present case in To­ba­go.

My rea­son for en­ter­tain­ing such thoughts is sim­ply be­cause of nu­mer­ous pipe-lay­ing projects that have just run cold on the is­land, even if some of them com­menced a year lat­er than was orig­i­nal­ly sched­uled.Is WASA de­lib­er­ate­ly un­der­min­ing the progress of the THA with re­spect to the main­te­nance of the roads on the is­land? Is this the sit­u­a­tion as they ex­pect that peo­ple will cast blame square­ly on the THA for the state of our roads?

With a crit­i­cal elec­tion on our doorsteps in 2015, any­thing is pos­si­ble, es­pe­cial­ly when one con­sid­ers that the Cen­tral Gov­ern­ment is wield­ing the au­thor­i­ty at WASA.My bone of con­tention is par­tic­u­lar­ly the main roads of John Di­al and Mt St George. Those two par­tic­u­lar road­ways are in se­ri­ous states of dis­re­pair, due to the pipe-lay­ing project that start­ed a whole year lat­er than the sched­ule date (which was Jan­u­ary 2013).

The con­di­tion they have left the roads is cre­at­ing great in­con­ve­nience to the trav­el­ling pub­lic and no one seems to care. I have seen a sim­i­lar project un­der­tak­en in Scar­bor­ough along the Gar­den-side Street and it was re­turned to al­most its orig­i­nal state with­in a week. Why can't the same be done in the John Di­al and Mt St George main roads?

This project was sup­posed to have start­ed since 2013, from John Di­al, and com­plet­ed ex­act­ly one year lat­er at Stud­ley Park, but we're ap­proach­ing an­oth­er full year with­out this project be­ing com­plet­ed.For this rea­son, the resur­fac­ing of these main roads can­not com­mence be­cause the old pipes rup­ture al­most on a dai­ly ba­sis and are re­paired al­most every oth­er day. It has now be­come tire­some look­ing at WASA work­men re­pair­ing the same spots week­ly.

This prob­lem is not on­ly oc­cur­ring in the ar­eas that I named but through­out the is­land. The pub­lic needs to know from WASA when we can ex­pect to get our roads back.Please WASA, just give us our roads back.

Garvin Wal­ters,

via e-mail