Le­gal ac­tion against the Gov­ern­ment on flood­ing is­sues is the next op­tion for vil­lagers of Bam­boo Num­ber 2.

It comes hours af­ter a con­fronta­tion be­tween the vil­lagers and Min­is­ter of Works and Trans­port Ro­han Sinanan and Min­is­ter of Rur­al De­vel­op­ment Faris Al-Rawi on Tues­day..

The af­fect­ed res­i­dents said they have been fac­ing flood­ing is­sues for the last five days, with wa­ter lev­els record­ed in some ar­eas as high as 12 feet.

They have re­tained at­tor­ney Richard Jages­sar to pur­sue the Gov­ern­ment for com­pen­sa­tion and loss­es.

“I would like to point out for the ben­e­fit of the vil­lagers that this is not the time to cast blame. That is not why we are here. We are here to fix the prob­lem. As you can see, this is a se­ri­ous prob­lem. There are peo­ple be­yond this point. This new riv­er that has de­vel­oped there are peo­ple be­yond here that can­not ac­cess med­ica­tion, food, drink­ing wa­ter, and so on,” at­tor­ney Richard Jages­sar said.

He added, “Those vil­lagers that we can­not see and hear from they are pen­sion­ers, they are the el­der­ly, they are preg­nant, they are the chil­dren that can­not go to school. Those are the peo­ple that I wish to rep­re­sent. Those are the peo­ple that have a claim against the min­is­ter. The min­is­ter has a claim against the man who al­leged­ly en­croached on the em­bank­ment which is his pre­rog­a­tive. He has a deal with his en­gi­neers, and his su­per­vi­sors about why that went on for two years if at all it went on, but these vil­lagers are hun­gry, starv­ing for five days.

Jages­sar added, “The vil­lagers would like the min­is­ter and his team of en­gi­neers, the Min­istry of Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment, PURE, and so on. We call for a meet­ing with them a face-to-face meet­ing with them and let us show you where the prob­lem is.”

De­spite the threat of le­gal ac­tion it still did not change the vil­lagers’ sit­u­a­tion as many are still see­ing al­most five feet of wa­ter in their homes and boats are the mode of trans­porta­tion for sup­plies for who can­not leave.

Com­mu­ni­ty ac­tivist and busi­ness­man In­shan Ish­mael told Guardian Me­dia, “The min­is­ter promised yes­ter­day has not been de­liv­ered. Res­i­dents have now put their lives at risk to go and open up one of the gates and dive un­der­wa­ter with no equip­ment in sewage wa­ter. So we are do­ing what the min­istry should have done.”

The vil­lagers were suc­cess­ful to open the sluice gates.

Ish­mael said, “ I stand proud here to­day that I run him out of Bam­boo and I’ll run him out again, so here’s what, we had enough and this is the way we are go­ing now, le­gal, whether they like it or not be­cause, at the end of the day, these res­i­dents can’t have a re­peat of this.”

De­spite the chal­lenges fac­ing the vil­lagers, gen­er­al man­ag­er of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Elec­tric­i­ty Com­mis­sion (T&TEC) Kelvin Ram­sook was on hand in Bam­boo Num­ber 2 to at­tempt to re­store pow­er.

“What we did, which was very im­por­tant we drove the cir­cuit on ei­ther side and no­ti­fy the cus­tomers who were there to make sure the switch of the break­ers on the down­stairs sec­tion of their house be­cause once we re­store ser­vice, we want to make sure that peo­ple are safe in the build­ing”, Ram­sook said.