Three years af­ter rag­ing floods from the Bor­de Narve Riv­er be­gan threat­en­ing their homes, res­i­dents of Mc Pan­cham Street, Bor­de Narve, breathed a sigh of re­lief when the Works Min­istry be­gan slope sta­bil­i­sa­tion works on the riv­er banks.

But just five months af­ter the project start­ed, res­i­dents say they are worse off. They claim the sta­bil­i­sa­tion works were not done up to stan­dard and led to fur­ther dam­age to their prop­er­ties.

With an over­ly ac­tive rainy sea­son fore­cast­ed, res­i­dents fear their homes will fall in­to the riv­er if the mat­ter is not rec­ti­fied soon.

When Guardian Me­dia vis­it­ed the area, the bas­kets placed by the con­trac­tor were low­er than ex­pect­ed. The riv­er could not flow as the con­trac­tor had paved part of the riv­er, mak­ing it high­er on one end. Res­i­dent Avinash Ma­haraj called for a full in­ves­ti­ga­tion. “In 2019, when the cav­ing start­ed, we called for help. In Oc­to­ber 2023, they start­ed the project. A to­tal of 3,000 bas­kets were sup­posed to be placed here but to date, there are less than 250,” he said.

He added, “They dredged the riv­er just be­low the riv­er bed and start­ed plac­ing the bas­kets but they didn’t cast the base, they placed them in a sin­gle row. Those bas­kets were sup­posed to be tied, and with the amount of wa­ter we have here when the rainy sea­son comes, it could cause the bas­kets to col­lapse back in­to the riv­er.”

Af­ter com­plaints were raised, he said, the Min­istry of Works dis­patched an au­di­tor to in­spect the works. Ma­haraj claimed they were told the works were not up to stan­dard.

“Pri­or to the au­dit, at no stage did the Min­istry of Works come to in­ves­ti­gate. No en­gi­neers came from the Drainage Di­vi­sion. These ten­ders are sup­posed to be done in stages,” he con­tend­ed.

Mean­while, coun­cil­lor for Bronte Ger­ard Per­reira said at least sev­en hous­es will be af­fect­ed if the min­istry does not man­date the con­trac­tor to cor­rect the work done.

“One house is cracked at this time and so at my re­gion­al meet­ing we raised this with the Min­istry of Works and I be­lieve our coun­cil wrote a let­ter to get in­for­ma­tion about works that were done here but to date, work has been done but not in the way it is sup­posed to be done,” Per­reira claimed. He said when the rainy sea­son starts, the vol­ume of wa­ter com­ing in could dev­as­tate the hous­es. He called on the min­is­ter to in­ter­vene im­me­di­ate­ly. The chair­man of the Pe­nal/Debe Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion Gow­tam Ma­haraj said res­i­dents were en­ti­tled to bet­ter ser­vice.

“We are mak­ing a call on the min­istry to put all sys­tems in place to en­sure that there is qual­i­ty con­trol and qual­i­ty as­sur­ance in this job. The line of bas­kets is too low to ac­com­mo­date the wa­ter flow. It needs more bas­kets,” Ma­haraj said.

Guardian Me­dia reached out to Works Min­is­ter Ro­han Sinanan for a com­ment, but calls and mes­sages to his phone went unan­swered.

Cor­rec­tion: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this ar­ti­cle re­ferred to the lo­ca­tion as Pan­cham Gar­dens. The ar­ti­cle has since been up­dat­ed to re­flect the cor­rect lo­ca­tion, which is Mc Pan­cham Street, Bor­de Narve.