With road repairs slated for the Diamond Housing Scheme East Bank Demerara, residents are hoping for action soon as they say that continued neglect could result in some streets becoming impassable.
When Stabroek News visited Diamond and neighbouring Grove yesterday, potholes could be seen across several roads, especially the main roads that lead to and from the East Bank public road.
At 11th Avenue, Diamond Housing Scheme, the road was so badly damaged that most drivers opt to take an alternative route to enter the area but this isn’t an option for those residents living near to large potholes.
The holes varied in circumference and depth but some were wide enough to cross the entire roadways. “This road here been here like this for a long, long, long time. As long as I can remember and I living in here long.
Obviously, it wasn’t this bad before but they keep ignoring it and it keep getting worse and worse every day,” James Bascom, a resident of the area, told Stabroek News yesterday. “You can’t even call those potholes anymore. You can’t even call it a road anymore either because of how it’s so bad. People got to use their car and drive through it sometimes because you can’t avoid it and even when you try to carefully pass them you end up dropping off of a deep edge and damaging something for you vehicle,” the man added.
Other residents from several other streets where they are large potholes also explained that they could not recall the last time work was done on the roads in the area.
“I’ve been living here for more than six years and I’ve never seen anybody from the NDC [Neighbourhood Democratic Council] or from the ministry come and fix these roads here,” a resident of 18th Avenue told Stabroek News.
In addition to more than eight streets in the area with large potholes, Diamond’s main access road is also badly damaged and is a major contributor to traffic congestion.
“In the morning when they got heavy traffic is mostly because of them holes that people does deh trying to avoid on the road. Nobody want to drive through it, so piece of the road does automatically turn into a one lane and other vehicles does got to wait to pass,” a resident related.
When Stabroek News contacted Chairman of the Grove/Diamond NDC Bharrat Narine, he pointed out that the main road was the responsibility of the Ministry of Public Infrastructure (MPI). However, he said, he made sure when he became the chairman several months ago that he met with officials from the ministry to ensure that there is a plan that they could roll out soon to start road repairs.
“In December, we started from the back doing some patches from Fourth Bridge and due to the inclement weather we couldn’t continue. We had stopped and did something at 19th Street and wanted to do Third Bridge but we had a meeting with MPI and they told us they have it in their work plan,” he added, while noting that several other inner roads in the area are also slated to be done by the ministry.
“The capacity of the NDC does not allow us to do major works on roads. All we can do is fill holes and do small patches but we can’t do complete roads and main thoroughfares but they [MPI] are looking at it,” he said.
