Work has started on Agriculture Road in Mon Repos, East Coast Demerara, but residents are convinced that the contractor is not doing a proper job and the road will quickly deteriorate after it is finished.
In a letter to Stabroek News, Gideon Cecil had said that while he was delighted to see work started on the road a week ago, it was not being done properly and the contractor was “very sloppy.”
Cecil said he noticed that the road was only graded up to the National Agricultural Research and Extension Institute (NAREI) and the contractor was throwing crushed brick or loam into big potholes, which was not the way to repair the road.
“First they need to cut these holes deep and dig out all the slush and the moisture underneath and allow them to dry before they put in any brick and cover it with bitumen. They are just throwing some bricks in these holes to cover them and now they will throw bitumen or asphalt. One can clearly see this road has tons of holes at the edges, and the edges are broken. They did nothing about the holes at the edges, and what they are doing will not last a month because very heavy trucks, hymacs and container trucks traverse this road daily,” Cecil said.
He pointed out that the road needs to be completely redone in a “durable and complete manner” and that the engineers should have taken into consideration the weight of vehicles that traverse it daily.
“The job I see currently being done on this road is very slow and lackadaisical, and now I am being told that they will not reach NAREI and half way down where all the bigger and deeper potholes are. From the time I saw them start work they ought to have passed NAREI by now and reached the stock farm at the back, but they are just dragging their feet,” he added.
He issued a call to Minister of Public Infrastructure David Patterson to send an engineer to stop the work until a proper contract is drafted for a more durable road.
“I have seen many roads built here and destroyed in less than a month, and that is exactly what will happen to Agriculture Road. If they are going to build this road it must be done properly with proper materials and it must be tested by an engineer before taxpayers’ money is paid to the contractor,” he said.
Other residents also expressed concern about whether the entire road, which is currently in a very deplorable state, was going to be fixed or just that one section. “They start more than a week ago and is not like they moving or anything cause they just there. They block off the road and they like they not moving. They got more serious sections of this road that need fixing fast cause it bruking up people car,” Rakesh (only name given), a resident of the area told Stabroek News on Friday.
Other residents also echoed similar remarks and questioned whether the work was going to extend to the entire road which they dubbed a “backdam road”.
