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Barbados Water Authority Communications Specialist Joy-Ann Haigh (left) and Acting Senior Superintendent Grantley Phillips, viewing a hole in the road at Rollins Road Brittons Hill, St Michael, which is in dire need of being reinstated.

Road Repair promise

Barbadians inconvenienced by roads left dug up after water works have been carried out by the Barbados Water Authority (BWA) will soon be getting some
relief.

The BWA recently started a road reinstatement project and according to the Authority’s Communications Specialist, Joy-Ann Haigh, the project is
necessary since the state-owned entity has been having some challenges with road reinstatement due to financial difficulties, causing a delay in the time the roads are fixed.

She was addressing members of the media who gathered at Oldbury, St Philip, opposite the Maria Holder Nursery School, yesterday.

“Basically after you get a report of a ruptured main, there is some digging that you have to do, and then of course the trenches have been left open, some for longer periods than others. Recently as you would know, we have some serious financial challenges at the Barbados Water Authority which has led to the delays in reinstatement. So we are reviewing the whole process and what we can do in order to get this reinstated a lot quicker. BWA is the one responsible for these basic repairs, we dug the holes so we have the responsibility to make sure that they have been reinstated in a timely fashion. We do apologise for it not happening, but let me repeat, our finances are really bad and we can’t afford to do it in the way we would like, so we came up with another measure of securing it better,” she said.

“There are a lot of them right now and today we are going to tackle as many of them as possible. It’s a lot of work to be done… We are reinstating the road, which includes back filling it, and rolling it so that it goes back to some sense of normalcy,” Haigh added.

While noting the BWA is seeking to reinstate as many roads across the island as possible, Haigh said in the meantime the BWA will be taking pictures of the roads that need reinstating, to be uploaded to the Authority’s Facebook page with a narrative that states exactly which roads had not been reinstated as yet, while asking motorists and pedestrians to proceed with caution. She explained that the information will be shared with the Government Information Service (GIS), as well as with other media houses as a public service announcement.

She said it is necessary for road users to check with the relevant media entities, especially before travelling at night, so that they would know they must proceed with caution.

“We are asking the public to please help us because we would like to repair them all in the same day, but we can’t. However, there are some cases where we do need to leave the trenches opened for about 24 to 48 hours because we want to see if the repair would hold. So what we will do is to make sure that we secure the areas a lot better, with lights and caution tape,” she said.
(AH)

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