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Thursday, July 17, 2025

Eyesore and stench at Maracas Bay

by

20170205

Sev­er­al weeks af­ter high tides caused flood­ing at Mara­cas Bay, the pop­u­lar tourist at­trac­tion re­mains in a de­plorable con­di­tion. Al­ready an eye­sore due to in­com­plete up­grade works, vis­i­tors to the beach, in­clud­ing tourists, have been com­plain­ing about the stench and the poor con­di­tion of the wash­rooms.

Among those com­plain­ing was Ter­ri Sheed, of the Unit­ed King­dom, who is in T&T on va­ca­tion.

"It is hor­rif­ic. What is all this?" she asked, point­ing to in­com­plete con­crete struc­tures.

"Do we need all of this on the beach? All this has spoiled love­ly Mara­cas Bay. Car­ni­val is com­ing up and here is a to­tal mess. It is very dis­ap­point­ing. They have com­plete­ly wrecked the beach."

Sheed added: "The toi­let fa­cil­i­ties . . . you can't get soap and the doors can't even close in prop­er­ly and lock, not to men­tion that you have to pay to use the toi­let fa­cil­i­ties. The gov­ern­ment should re­al­ly be em­bar­rassed."

John Brown, of Eng­land, a first time vis­i­tor, said his ini­tial re­ac­tion when he got to Mara­cas Bay was: "How on earth do we get around all this (re­fer­ring to the fenc­ing that bar­ri­cades the con­struc­tion sites on the beach) to the beach."

His friend, Michael Asker, al­so from Eng­land, who has been a reg­u­lar vis­i­tor to T&T since 1968, called for up­grades to the fa­cil­i­ty to be com­plet­ed quick­ly.

"It is a won­der­ful beach, an idyl­lic spot, but peo­ple vis­it­ing the beach need prop­er fa­cil­i­ties, in­clud­ing good bath­room fa­cil­i­ties," he said.

Pres­i­dent of the Mara­cas Bay Ven­dors As­so­ci­a­tion, Fes­tus Imasekha, who op­er­ates two bake and shark booths, said ven­dors "lose tremen­dous­ly" when­ev­er the fa­cil­i­ty floods. He said on an av­er­age day dur­ing the week, the 28 food ven­dors at the fa­cil­i­ty earn $1,500, while on week­ends and pub­lic hol­i­days that fig­ure in­creas­es to $5,000.

"When the tides are high we are forced to close and our busi­ness­es are af­fect­ed be­cause of the flood­ing. I was forced to help out the sit­u­a­tion by rent­ing a pump to have the wa­ter pumped out and that cost me $500 a day," he said.

Imasekha said he was told by an of­fi­cial at the Tourism De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny that he will not be com­pen­sat­ed be­cause no one told him to do that.

"But if they are not do­ing any­thing about the sit­u­a­tion we have to try and help out our­selves be­cause we are the ones los­ing out," he said.

Imasekha said he hopes the con­struc­tion work is com­plet­ed in quick time as it is cre­at­ing a safe­ty and health haz­ard, not for the ven­dors but beach go­ers and vis­i­tors as well.

Con­tact­ed for com­ment, Works Min­is­ter Ro­han Sinanan yes­ter­day con­firmed that ten­ders for com­ple­tion of up­grades to the fa­cil­i­ty were closed last Thurs­day. He added that Nid­co of­fi­cials did an eval­u­a­tion ex­er­cise over the week­end and he will be meet­ing with them to dis­cuss their find­ings.

Sinanan and Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert re­cent­ly made an im­promp­tu vis­it to the fa­cil­i­ty and spoke with ven­dors and beach­go­ers. He said the flood­ing prob­lem was caused by hu­man er­ror.

"There is a pump at the back of the fa­cil­i­ty that is not func­tion­ing in the way it should so we have tried to put some­thing in place so that once rain starts to fall the pump comes on in time to have the wa­ter pumped out. There was al­so no run off for the food huts and that con­tributed to the flood­ing is­sues as well," he said.

"We would like the works to get start­ed as soon as pos­si­ble and be­fore the rainy sea­son kicks in."

Up­grades stalled since 2015

In 2009, Cab­i­net ap­proved $233 mil­lion for the Mara­cas Beach Re­design and Restora­tion Project. The Tourism De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny, through the Min­istry of Tourism, was giv­en the man­date to man­age the project and the Bei­jing Li­u­jian Con­struc­tion Cor­po­ra­tion won an in­ter­na­tion­al ten­der to pro­vide de­sign and build ser­vices.

On June 8, 2014, the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship gov­ern­ment award­ed Kall­co the project at a cost of $85 mil­lion plus VAT and con­tin­gency.

In Ju­ly 2015, then Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar an­nounced a re­vised fig­ure of $120 mil­lion down from the $233 mil­lion that has been ap­proved by the pre­vi­ous ad­min­is­tra­tion.

Fol­low­ing the Gen­er­al Elec­tions in Sep­tem­ber 2015, Tourism Min­is­ter Sham­fa Cud­joe took con­cerns about the project to Cab­i­net and the mat­ter was re­ferred to the Of­fice of the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al for re­view. Kall­co's con­tract was sub­se­quent­ly ter­mi­nat­ed and the mat­ter is now pro­ceed­ing to ar­bi­tra­tion.

T&T Guardian un­der­stands that a re-ten­der­ing process in three dis­tinct work pack­ages is ex­pect­ed to deal with road works, the car park and re­lat­ed civ­il works, con­struc­tion of vend­ing booths, wash­rooms and oth­er fa­cil­i­ties and up­grade of the sew­er treat­ment plant.


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