KEVON FELMINE

kevon.felmine@guardian.co.tt

Min­is­ter of Works and Trans­port Ro­han Sinanan says de­signs for the re­pairs to the Man­zanil­la-Ma­yaro Road are com­plete, and a note is cur­rent­ly be­fore Cab­i­net for its ap­proval.

Sinanan told Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day that the Min­istry of Works and Trans­port should in­vite ten­ders for the road con­struc­tion project in the next two weeks. Once the process goes well, work should be­gin with­in a month or month and a half.

Por­tions of the Man­zanil­la/Ma­yaro Road crum­pled last No­vem­ber un­der heavy rain­fall and in­tense flood­ing, caus­ing the Min­istry to close the road. Res­i­dents had to use longer al­ter­na­tive routes to get to and from their homes.

The min­istry built a 10 km by­pass road cost­ing $14 mil­lion to re­store traf­fic flow. In 2014, wa­ter from the Nar­i­va Riv­er spilt over the road­way, wash­ing away chunks of as­phalt, re­sult­ing in the min­istry build­ing a new sec­tion. De­spite miss­ing out on the Dry Sea­son to car­ry out the work, Sinanan said it was a project that need­ed a prop­er de­sign.

“What we were hop­ing and still hop­ing will hap­pen was that be­fore the down­pour of the rainy sea­son, we will be able to get off the ground. It is not some­thing that you could have just gone in and start­ed to do work. You had to do de­signs. You had to do stud­ies. You had to do con­sul­ta­tions be­fore you ac­tu­al­ly start­ed the project,” Sinanan said.

With weath­er pat­terns chang­ing sig­nif­i­cant­ly in the last decade, Sinanan said the min­istry con­sid­ered this when iden­ti­fy­ing weak­ness­es in the road­way to rec­ti­fy with this project.

He said the plan is to build a re­silient road, but peo­ple must ac­cept that it is in a chal­leng­ing area, with the Nar­i­va Swamp oc­cu­py­ing 225,000 acres drain­ing on one side and the sea cre­at­ing hav­oc on the coast­line.

Sinanan said that when the min­istry com­pletes the re­pairs, there will be a con­tin­u­a­tion of the study to see how it can con­tin­ue to im­prove the area to with­stand harsh weath­er.

While work con­tin­ues on the Solomon Ho­choy High­way Ex­ten­sion to Point Fortin, a con­trac­tor was yet to re­pair a por­tion of the north­bound car­riage­way along the Mos­qui­to Creek, South Oropouche, which col­lapsed in Jan­u­ary 2022.

While the Creek re­mains open, the Min­istry redi­rects the traf­fic flow on­to the south­bound lane for sev­er­al hun­dred me­ters. Sinanan said the min­istry al­so had to do stud­ies on that area.
“My in­for­ma­tion as ear­ly as to­day was that every­thing was com­plet­ed.

The so­lu­tion has been found, and they are ac­tu­al­ly fi­nal­is­ing the new de­sign for what has to be done to the area. They are fi­nal­is­ing that, and work will re­sume on that part of the fail­ure short­ly.”