RAD­HI­CA DE SIL­VA

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

rad­hi­ca.sookraj@guardian.co.tt

Res­i­dents of Rio Claro took to the streets in fiery protests across three key ar­eas, demon­strat­ing against a lack of pipe-borne wa­ter, es­ca­lat­ing ero­sion, and de­te­ri­o­rat­ing road con­di­tions.

The protests led to roads be­ing blocked in St Emelia Street, Ceme­tery Trace, and La Paruse.

Pro­test­ers raised con­cerns about safe­ty, cit­ing a lack of ac­ces­si­bil­i­ty for emer­gency ve­hi­cles due to the con­di­tions.

They al­so com­plained about pests like snakes, in­fest­ing over­grown bush­es.

Res­i­dents say they are fear­ful about struc­tur­al in­tegri­ty of the land in the area, with one house al­ready hav­ing col­lapsed on St Emelia Trace.

Many oth­ers are said to be on the verge of col­lapse.

"We’ve tried to man­age with the re­sources we have, pur­chas­ing ma­te­ri­als our­selves to fix the road but there's been no help from gov­ern­ment agen­cies," one pro­test­er said.

In re­sponse, MP for Ma­yaro, Rush­ton Paray, high­light­ed the grav­i­ty of the sit­u­a­tion by re­veal­ing that "there are over 100 land­slips in the con­stituen­cy, af­fect­ing dozens of homes."

He said there had been at­tempts made by the Ma­yaro/Rio Claro Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion to ad­dress the sit­u­a­tion say­ing, "They have made nu­mer­ous vis­its with their en­gi­neer­ing teams to in­ves­ti­gate. De­spite con­tin­u­ous com­mu­ni­ca­tion from my of­fice to state agen­cies for di­rect in­ter­ven­tion, our pleas have fall­en on deaf ears."

In a per­son­al at­tempt to al­le­vi­ate the sit­u­a­tion, Paray said he spent $8,000 from his own fi­nances to pur­chase pipes.

How­ev­er, he added that the fund­ing re­quired for re­pairs re­mains un­avail­able at the MR­CRC.

Paray said, "As MP for Ma­yaro, I con­tin­ue to call on the Min­is­ter of Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment and Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and the Min­is­ter of Works and Trans­port to ad­dress these and oth­er land­slips ur­gent­ly."

He as­sured the res­i­dents of his con­tin­ued com­mit­ment, promis­ing to "ac­tive­ly lob­by with the state agen­cies con­cern­ing all in­fra­struc­ture is­sues."