Derek Achong

Op­er­a­tions of the Tu­na­puna Mag­is­trates' Court are ex­pect­ed to re­sume at the Tu­na­puna Ad­min­is­tra­tive Com­plex from as ear­ly as Mon­day. This comes al­most four months af­ter the court was shut down and re­lo­cat­ed to the Port-of-Spain Mag­is­trates' Court build­ing on St Vin­cent Street, Port-of-Spain due to health and safe­ty con­cerns em­a­nat­ing from leak­ing sewage lines at the fa­cil­i­ty. The court or­der and its cor­re­spond­ing ef­fects which forced the court's clo­sure last year were yes­ter­day re­versed by Mag­is­trate Bramb­hanan Dubay, pre­sid­ing in the Tu­na­puna Third Court. Dubay ini­tial­ly grant­ed the or­der on Sep­tem­ber 14 af­ter hear­ing ev­i­dence pre­sent­ed by pub­lic health of­fi­cials at­tached to the Min­istry of Health.

Short­ly af­ter the clo­sure of the com­plex, the court and its en­tire staff mem­bers were tem­po­rary re­lo­cat­ed to the Port-of-Spain court, a move which was met with the dis­sat­is­fac­tion of users of the court who had to trav­el a longer dis­tance to ac­cess the fa­cil­i­ties. Dur­ing yes­ter­day's ap­pli­ca­tion to re­open the court which was brought by the Min­istry of Pub­lic Ad­min­is­tra­tion, Dubay heard the tes­ti­mo­ny of med­ical of­fi­cer for St George East, Dr Adele Chin and pub­lic health of­fi­cer, Ken­more Gra­ham. While tes­ti­fy­ing, Chin ex­plained to Dubay that if the leak­ing pipelines were re­placed and re­in­forced, there would be a re­duced like­li­hood of fu­ture leaks at the com­plex. Chin al­so not­ed that, as of yes­ter­day, the build­ing which is lo­cat­ed along the East­ern Main Road in Tu­na­puna was safe for hu­man habi­ta­tion.

Pub­lic ad­min­is­tra­tion of­fi­cers who were present in court, gave an un­der­tak­ing to do the nec­es­sary re­pairs as soon as pos­si­ble through the Na­tion­al In­fra­struc­ture De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny (Nid­co). The of­fi­cial claimed that once start­ed the stip­u­lat­ed re­pairs could be com­plet­ed in less than a day. At­tor­ney Pe­ter Ramkisson ap­peared on be­half of the Min­istry of Health dur­ing yes­ter­day's ap­pli­ca­tion hear­ing.