Sascha Wil­son

Fol­low­ing a land­slide on Ram­lal Street, Pe­nal, five months ago, one home has crum­bled, three more are at risk, and the road is im­pass­able.

With the rainy sea­son ap­proach­ing, res­i­dents are call­ing on the Land Set­tle­ment Agency (LSA) to rec­ti­fy the is­sue be­fore the sit­u­a­tion wors­ens.

Lau­ra Ho­sein com­plained that her son has to park his ve­hi­cle at a neigh­bour’s home be­cause the dirt has cov­ered most of the road, leav­ing bare­ly a foot­path to their homes.

Ho­sein said the land­slide oc­curred on No­vem­ber 28 af­ter days of heavy rain­fall, and since then, they have been ask­ing the LSA to help them.

“Rain is com­ing just now. We have been plead­ing. We went up to LSA. We sent pic­tures of every­thing that is hap­pen­ing here...Some­thing has to be done now,” she said

An­oth­er res­i­dent, Kim­ber­ly Khan, a moth­er of two, said it’s been dif­fi­cult for her fam­i­ly.

“I have two kids that go to school. My house was un­der ren­o­va­tion when this hap­pened. I can­not do any­thing for five months and go­ing. Be­sides that, my hus­band is a me­chan­ic, he can­not have ac­cess to no work here. He had to get an in­spec­tion of his truck as well as my car. We can­not do any­thing with our ve­hi­cles,” said Khan.

She is al­so con­cerned that emer­gency ve­hi­cles have no ac­cess to them.

Mean­while, Natasha Deo and her fam­i­ly now need a place to call home af­ter her house, where she resided for 15 years, col­lapsed last De­cem­ber.

She re­called, “When we came from work, we just saw part of the dirt was cav­ing, and the oth­er two to three days we saw the house lean and every­thing was just com­ing down.”

Deo and her hus­band were forced to move out of the house with their one-year-old ba­by and her hus­band’s 11-year-old niece and are tem­porar­i­ly stay­ing with her sis­ter.

“I am ask­ing for help,” she said.

Pe­nal coun­cil­lor Shan­ti Boodram said the LSA in­formed them they were in the process of draw­ing up de­signs for a re­tain­ing wall but now fund­ing is an is­sue.

Boodram said the Pe­nal/Debe Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion start­ed re­mov­ing the dirt off the road last Mon­day, but she called on the LSA to take ur­gent ac­tion.

In a re­sponse on the is­sue, LSA Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer, Haz­ar Ho­sein, said that plan­ning, geo-tech­no­log­i­cal work and de­signs for a re­tain­ing wall were 95 per cent com­plet­ed and the ten­der for the project should be out in about a week.

Ho­sein said, “The LSA does not have a bud­get for these types of nat­ur­al dis­as­ters and if we are re­quired to as­sist, we have to re­quest funds in the next bud­get or in the Mid-Term Re­view. Al­ter­na­tive­ly, we have to redi­rect ex­pen­di­ture from bud­get­ed projects which ben­e­fit oth­er com­mu­ni­ties to deal with sit­u­a­tions like that.”

He added that the re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tion and the Min­istry of Works and Trans­port are bet­ter equipped to deal with nat­ur­al dis­as­ters.

“Yes, we have a re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for squat­ter reg­u­lar­i­sa­tion, where we put prop­er road in­fra­struc­ture in dif­fer­ent ar­eas, but as you go along and with the type of rain­fall we are hav­ing, you do have such sit­u­a­tions oc­cur­ring and there are many dif­fer­ent or­gan­i­sa­tions who have a re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to as­sist in deal­ing with it,” he said.