Wes­ley Gib­bings

On the heels of last Sat­ur­day's trag­ic events in west Trinidad, ner­vous St Joseph res­i­dents are hop­ing the hills over­look­ing the his­toric town don't al­so come tum­bling down as a re­sult of il­le­gal land clear­ing and squat­ting. Chair­man of the Eliz­a­beth Gar­dens and En­vi­rons As­so­ci­a­tion (EGEA), Basha Mo­hammed, said in an in­ter­view the au­thor­i­ties have in­ves­ti­gat­ed but stopped short of firm ac­tion against per­sis­tent squat­ting and slash-and-burn farm­ing ac­tiv­i­ties on the hill­side.

"We do not want a sit­u­a­tion to de­vel­op here to cause the de­struc­tion and loss of lives as what hap­pened in Diego Mar­tin and Mar­aval over the week­end," Mo­hammed said. The as­so­ci­a­tion has for months at­tempt­ed to se­cure some kind of of­fi­cial in­ter­ven­tion. Let­ters have been writ­ten to St Joseph MP Her­bert Vol­ney and the Com­mis­sion­er of State Lands, Ku­mar Koonoolal, in ad­di­tion to re­ports to the po­lice.

In one spe­cif­ic in­stance, the as­so­ci­a­tion ad­vised Vol­ney that "pre­vi­ous ex­ca­va­tion of the hill just be­low the area where the squat­ting is tak­ing place and de­for­esta­tion have in our re­spect­ful view al­ready weak­ened the slope and we fear the squat­ting ac­tiv­i­ty could cre­ate dev­as­tat­ing land­slides which will af­fect the res­i­dents be­low."

In its mis­sive to Koonoolal the as­so­ci­a­tion iden­ti­fied one por­tion of hill­side land which had al­ready been the fo­cus of an evic­tion no­tice in 1984 when res­i­dents, back then, com­plained. "We be­lieve," says the let­ter to the state lands of­fi­cial, "that it is the in­ten­tion of this per­son (name called) and oth­ers to es­tab­lish a squat­ting com­mu­ni­ty in this area, which will bring all the at­ten­dant eco­log­i­cal and so­cial prob­lems that you would be con­ver­sant Chief Sec­re­tary of the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly Orville Lon­don presents a cheque for $3,000 to Sgt Rams­den of the Spe­cial Re­serve Po­lice Di­vi­sion to as­sist in the team's foot­ball fundrais­ing event.

The cheque will help sub­sidise the Po­lice Di­vi­sion's Sports Club's First An­nu­al Fundrais­ing Foot­ball Tour­na­ment to be held to­mor­row at the Ply­mouth Recre­ation­al Ground at 3.30 pm. The po­lice di­vi­sion holds fundrais­ers twice a year to with." Both Vol­ney and Koono­lal have since had in­spec­tions done, but Mo­hammed said "no pos­i­tive ac­tion has been tak­en to re­move the squat­ter from the wa­ter­shed re­serve."

Re­search con­duct­ed by the as­so­ci­a­tion re­vealed that much of the hill­side lands cur­rent­ly be­ing cleared for farm­ing and squat­ter set­tle­ments are des­ig­nat­ed "state soil con­ser­va­tion" ar­eas and are al­so wa­ter­sheds. In 2010, a hill­side home col­lapsed, forc­ing the evac­u­a­tion of 18 res­i­dents of Eliz­a­beth Gar­dens Vil­las lo­cat­ed be­low the struc­ture which even­tu­al­ly had to be de­mol­ished. Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter, Jack Warn­er, has an­nounced the planned in­tro­duc­tion of laws to reg­u­late hill­side con­struc­tion