Yvonne Webb

Min­is­ter of Wa­ter Re­sources and the En­vi­ron­ment Gan­ga Singh has blamed in­dis­crim­i­nate dump­ing in the city's sew­er mains for the sink­hole on Scott Street, San Fer­nan­do. Dur­ing a site vis­it on Mon­day, Singh al­so blamed a his­tor­i­cal lack of in­vest­ment in the waste­water sec­tor for the col­lapse of roads al­so in Port-of-Spain and Ari­ma.

"The fact of the mat­ter is that there has not been a co­her­ent pro­gramme of in­vest­ment in the sew­er­age in­fra­struc­ture in this coun­try," he said. "This sew­er main, like the ones in Port-of-Spain and Ari­ma, was laid down by Lock Joint in the ear­ly 1960s. Since then there has been a se­ries of pack­age plants, but no co­her­ent pro­gramme of sew­er­age in­fra­struc­ture."

Singh said the Gov­ern­ment in­tends to make a sig­nif­i­cant in­vest­ment in waste­water in­fra­struc­ture. "Gov­ern­ment has em­barked on a pro­gramme, to­geth­er with the In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank (IDB), with a view to ex­pand­ing the sew­er plant in San Fer­nan­do and Ari­ma, and that is a US$600 mil­lion pro­gramme, over a four-year pe­ri­od," he said.

"Whilst we are do­ing that, we are al­so in­vest­ing over US$30 mil­lion with the aban­doned sew­er­age treat­ment plant. "The sewage sec­tor will now be get­ting a co­her­ent pro­gramme of cap­i­tal in­vest­ment, and Scott Street will be part of that process." Singh said com­mu­ni­ties must now stop dump­ing in­dis­crim­i­nate­ly in­to the sew­er sys­tem. "What we are get­ting here, clear­ly, is that there has been a sig­nif­i­cant dump­ing of ma­te­r­i­al in the sew­er sys­tem,"?Singh said.

Since the sink­hole ap­peared, last Wednes­day, Scott Street has been closed off to traf­fic, for the Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA) to do emer­gency re­pairs. In a state­ment yes­ter­day, WASA said the street will be opened this morn­ing, ex­act­ly a week af­ter the col­lapse, which was caused by the rup­ture of a 24-inch sew­er main.

WASA's Daniel Plen­ty, man­ag­er of cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ca­tions, said the project, which was ex­pect­ed to be com­plet­ed with­in 72 hours, was de­layed be­cause of the poor state of the pipeline and be­cause WASA?had dis­cov­ered large amounts of grav­el and rub­ble along the sew­er main in the fi­nal area of re­pair. Singh al­so thanked the com­mu­ni­ty, mo­torists and the busi­ness sec­tor for their pa­tience dur­ing the past week.

Busi­ness own­ers on the street have com­plained of heavy fi­nan­cial loss­es, be­cause of the in­con­ve­nience caused by the sink­hole and an­oth­er col­lapse which oc­curred close by, on Sep­tem­ber 17.