Senior Reporter
sascha.wilson@guardian.co.tt
Massive land movement in Los Iros has caused gaping cracks, severe road damage and destruction of agricultural lands leaving 35 farmers cut off from their gardens and putting their livelihoods in jeopardy.
Experts who visited the area off Royal Engineering Road, commonly called R Road, yesterday warned that the situation could get worse as the unstable ground continues to shift and cracks are widening due to fault line movement.
Access to the popular mud volcano site has also been cut off as vehicular traffic is impossible and entry into the community has become dangerous.
Farmers woke up on Friday morning to the devastation. Seven years ago, they had a similar experience after a major earthquake caused significant damage, but they said this is worse as their ponds have been destroyed, further saturating the land amid heavy rainfall. Some packing houses were also destroyed.
“The more you walking going, is the more you seeing land slipping and going down. Now if you walking and you now watching where you putting your foot, you can break your foot. It have some places about 15 feet depth the land open,” said Ishwar Bholai who cultivates tomatoes, hot peppers and pimento.
Bholai said he planted more than 18,700 plants but now has no access to his land.
“The cracks gone through my tomato field,” he said.
Bholai believes the earth movement was caused by oil exploration several years ago when explosives were used.
Another farmer, Kishore Ragoobar, said, “The distance where I have to tote is real far, up, down. How the land move you have to go up and down. It terrible.”
Ragoobar, who cultivates tomatoes, bodi, hot pepper and baigan, said on Saturday he paid someone $200 to carry one bag of baigan.
He said two of his ponds were destroyed and some crops were lost to uprooted trees.
“This is a real disaster,” lamented Sunil Balsingh, who has been farming in the area along with his brother, for 40 years.
“I lost a field of baigan because the earth shake-up, 500-600 in length and in width about four feet. The land buss in two and I had a big pond and a small pond mash up.”
Balsingh said a nearby swamp was also destroyed.
Another farmer, Naresh “Nobby” Mathura, is also counting his losses.
“My tractor and my equipment where the land burst everything gone down in the crack,” he said.
Mathura said he wants to be relocated as it’s a recurring problem.
Senior Geologist Xavier Moonan and Gavin Elsley, Senior Geophysicist at Touchstone Exploration, visited the site yesterday. Elsley said there were huge movements along the fault lines, and one part of the road had broken off completely and shifted more than 50 feet away.
“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” he added.
Moonan recalled that in 2018, an earthquake caused the fault line to move he believes it happened again but is now the damage is more severe.
With recent heavy rainfall adding to the land’s saturation, he said, “The faults have opened up and allowing a lot of that water, creating a sliding surface to allow pretty more slippage to occur. It is likely this is going to get worse.”
He added that the movement of the faults is causing the slippage, not the mud volcanoes.
Acting Minister of Agriculture, Land and Fisheries Saddam Hosein and La Brea MP Clyde Elder trekked through the mud and bushes to visit the affected area yesterday and promised to assist the farmers.