Ot­to Car­ring­ton

Se­nior Re­porter

ot­to.car­ring­ton@cnc3.co.tt

Thou­sands of mo­torists and busi­ness op­er­a­tors were left frus­trat­ed yes­ter­day morn­ing af­ter a na­tion­wide tech­ni­cal fail­ure forced the tem­po­rary clo­sure of Li­cens­ing Of­fices across Trinidad and To­ba­go, dis­rupt­ing ap­point­ments and send­ing ear­ly ar­rivals home.

The Min­istry of Trans­port and Civ­il Avi­a­tion con­firmed that all Li­cens­ing Of­fices would re­main closed un­til 11 am, cit­ing “tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties be­yond our con­trol” as tech­ni­cians worked to re­store the sys­tem.

How­ev­er, no de­tailed ex­pla­na­tion was pro­vid­ed for the out­age.

Ca­roni, Port-of-Spain and San Fer­nan­do, along with oth­er branch­es, were af­fect­ed.

The de­lay caused sig­nif­i­cant frus­tra­tion for com­muters and busi­ness own­ers who ar­rived at var­i­ous lo­ca­tions well be­fore dawn to se­cure their places in line.

For many, the three-hour de­lay rep­re­sent­ed a lost day of work and wast­ed trav­el ex­pens­es.

Cit­i­zens ar­riv­ing from as ear­ly as 8 am de­scribed con­fu­sion and frus­tra­tion as they were told op­er­a­tions could not pro­ceed.

One man said he was in­formed short­ly af­ter ar­riv­ing that “the sys­tem is down and I have to come back lat­er,” adding that he had tak­en time off work to com­plete his li­cens­ing ap­point­ment.

“I took a day off from work to­day to come here,” an­oth­er vis­i­tor said. “So, I don’t know how to tell my boss, man. I just can’t take the next day off to­mor­row for noth­ing.”

Oth­ers at­tempt­ing to com­plete re­newals said they were left with­out clear guid­ance on resched­ul­ing.

“I was try­ing to find out if I could come back to­mor­row…but no­body want­ed to an­swer me,” one ap­pli­cant not­ed.

The min­istry is­sued an apol­o­gy, stat­ing: “We sin­cere­ly apol­o­gise for any in­con­ve­nience this de­lay may cause and ap­pre­ci­ate your pa­tience and un­der­stand­ing as we work to re­solve the mat­ter prompt­ly.”

Gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials is­sued an apol­o­gy for the dis­rup­tion, urg­ing the pub­lic to re­main pa­tient and to mon­i­tor of­fi­cial chan­nels for fur­ther up­dates as ef­forts con­tin­ue to re­store full ser­vice.

Guardian Me­dia at­tempt­ed to con­tact Trans­port Com­mis­sion­er Clive Clark, but we were un­suc­cess­ful.

Guardian Me­dia was re­li­ably in­formed that the sys­tem be­came ful­ly op­er­a­tional af­ter 11 am with all ser­vices avail­able to the pub­lic.