There was no visible police presence and no vendors, but couples and families found nooks and crannies to park their cars along the Rupert Craig Highway, the venue of the now banned seawall ‘lime’ on Sunday.
Small pockets of parked cars dotted the highway in between police barricades and sandbags. The seawall itself had a decent amount of activity with people walking and enjoying the Sunday evening sea breeze clearly ignoring the Ministry of Public Works ban.
Vendors populated the area between the Kingston bandstand and Vlissengen Road. However their numbers and the numbers of people partaking were significantly reduced in the area designated by the Public Works Ministry. The area itself is crowded with construction material as the ministry is currently building groynes in the area and placing more riprap along the existing wall.
Benches have been replaced with bobcats and other heavy duty machinery with various piles of rocks taking up precious space near the bandstand.
Soil degradation and clogged drains along the highway had made it necessary to halt the weekly activity from the Sheriff Street area, the ministry had said. Minister Robeson Benn, in an invited comment had told Stabroek News that the “soil is not healthy and it’s not able to absorb water”. He had said that the years of soil degradation had made the area susceptible to flooding. “When the people are out here every Sunday all that garbage, it is clogging the drain and the area floods,” Benn stated.
He said the recent weather conditions that caused high waves to crash over the seawall were made significantly worse because the drainage was poor. Benn stated that the drainage along the highway was capable of moving three feet of water however with all the garbage and mud clogging the drains the capacity is reduced to less than a third of that.
Benn said it wasn’t just the adjacent drain along the highway but road conduits that were also persistently clogged and for as long as the overtopping and the sporadic weather continued the sea wall lime had to be stopped.
Up to Friday ministry crews were digging out mud and sand from drains along the highway, which were reducing the drainage capacity.
