Where is Works and Trans­port Min­is­ter Ro­han Sinanan? At a time when the coun­try needs him most - with nu­mer­ous roads across Trinidad af­fect­ed by flood­ing, land­slides and oth­er in­fra­struc­tur­al is­sues, ef­fec­tive­ly ren­der­ing some of them im­pass­able - the Min­is­ter is nowhere to be seen this week.

Flood­ing, of course, is not a new phe­nom­e­non here.

How­ev­er, the past two months have brought some of the worst flood­ing this coun­try has seen since 2018. Not to men­tion the cur­rent con­cern that these dan­ger­ous and un­healthy wa­ters are not re­ced­ing quick­ly in some ar­eas.

As just an ex­am­ple, El So­cor­ro South in San Juan was in­un­dat­ed for al­most a week.

Sim­i­lar­ly, wa­ter at Abat­toir Road, a ma­jor thor­ough­fare in­to Port-of-Spain, has bare­ly budged af­ter re­cent con­tin­u­ous heavy down­pours.

To make mat­ters worse, the Man­zanil­la/Ma­yaro Main Road, af­fec­tion­ate­ly known as "the co­conuts’," is now closed once again in a re­peat of the dev­as­ta­tion of 2014.

Hun­dreds of res­i­dents there stand to be af­fect­ed in the com­ing days, as the Pub­lic Trans­port Ser­vice Cor­po­ra­tion has al­ready sus­pend­ed all ser­vices out of San­gre Grande en route to Guayagua­yare.

Yet, there is noth­ing but ra­dio si­lence from Mr Sinanan on these de­vel­op­ments.

We would have thought by now that we would, at the very least, have seen im­ages of him on the ground as­sess­ing the lat­est sit­u­a­tion, as a pre­cur­sor to re­port­ing to the na­tion on a short, medi­um and long-term ac­tion plan.

In a by­gone era, the Min­is­ter of Works was one of the na­tion’s most vis­i­ble cab­i­net mem­bers. In fact, many of them were house­hold names, among them Car­los John, John Humphrey, Colm Im­bert and who could for­get Jack Warn­er. In the ear­ly days of the for­mer Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship gov­ern­ment, Mr Warn­er com­man­deered the me­dia for months, con­duct­ing site vis­its to every pot­hole, box drain and land­slide he could find.

Ad­mit­ted­ly, mon­ey was flow­ing a lot more freely back then and, in Mr Sinanan’s de­fence, he is now be­ing asked to do more with less.

But that’s no ex­cuse for him to es­sen­tial­ly be a ‘works’ from home min­is­ter, es­pe­cial­ly when flood-prone com­mu­ni­ties are on the brink of dis­as­ters.

With each pass­ing day, the sit­u­a­tion as it re­lates to flood­ing is be­com­ing more dire as ad­verse weath­er and river­ine alerts are ex­tend­ed and the im­pact of cli­mate change hits home in a very re­al way.

Ear­li­er this month, we would have heard Mr Sinanan blam­ing pro­longed rain­fall for the slow pace of work. He had al­so said the Min­istry of Works and Trans­port has 60 on­go­ing road paving projects, which they can on­ly do un­der suit­able weath­er.

But what is Mr Sinanan and his min­istry do­ing to en­sure this coun­try’s in­fra­struc­ture can weath­er the storm?

Giv­en the cur­rent lev­el of dis­place­ment, we are ea­ger to hear from him now and to see re­al ac­tion on the con­tin­u­ing in­fra­struc­tur­al woes cit­i­zens are fac­ing al­most dai­ly now.