Golding sounds emergency alarm on Troy bridge crisis

WESTERN BUREAU:

OPPOSITION LEADER Mark Golding is urging the Government to treat the replacement of the collapsed Troy bridge in Trelawny Southern as an emergency situation.

Golding made the call as residents in the parishes of Trelawny and Manchester continue to be severely inconvenienced since the structure collapsed two years ago.

Speaking to The Gleaner on Wednesday following a tour of the surrounding areas with other People’s National Party officials, Golding said the bridge crisis has been ignored for too long.

“This major infrastructural asset that links two parishes is the route by which children go to school from one side to the other and where people have to go to in order to get to work, and it is very debilitating for them. I am urging the Government to deal with this matter with alacrity because it is an emergency, and it needs to be addressed,” Golding said.

Residents of Troy have been complaining about the ongoing delay in replacing the bridge, which collapsed in August 2021 during the passage of Tropical Storm Grace.

The bridge, which was built in 1869, served residents of Trelawny, Manchester, and St Elizabeth, including students of the nearby Troy High and Troy Primary School.

Makeshift structures

Golding noted that while he has had ongoing discussions about the bridge with Mikael Phillips, the member of parliament for Manchester North Western, residents who need to cross from Manchester into Trelawny and vice-versa continue to endanger themselves by using a makeshift structure now in place.

A rope-and-bucket swing is the main mechanism now used to transport goods and people from one side of the river to the other, with cargo and passengers suspended several feet over the rushing Hector River below.

There is also a makeshift bamboo structure suspended over the river allowing for limited pedestrian traffic.

“MP Phillips has been advocating hard for the bridge to be attended to quickly, but it still hasn’t moved at all. The latest he heard is that the Ministry of Finance is now looking at it, but is trying to assess whether it should be treated as an emergency or not. But it clearly is because it is so dislocating to the people who are relying on the bridge,” Golding argued.

“For the children who attend school, they face great danger crossing it because all there is now is a rigged makeshift bamboo structure that is very precarious, and it’s, quite frankly, a danger to whoever is using it,” said Golding.

Meanwhile, Phillips lamented that the potential $160 million cost to replace the bridge will increase the longer it takes to undertake the project.

“The breakaway is getting wider, and the longer we wait, the more that the bridge will cost for the Government of Jamaica. Currently, the budget is about $160 million, and if inflation continues this way, in a short while, we will be spending $200 million on a bridge that should not have cost so much,” said Phillips.

“As it is right now, 99.99 per cent of the students that live on the Manchester side and go to school in Troy have relocated to schools within the parishes of Manchester and St Elizabeth. You have persons living on the Manchester side who work in Christiana, and it’s closer to get to Christiana by going across the bridge, but now they have to rent from residents on the Trelawny side to be able to go back and forth to work because once the river is in spate, if you’re on the Trelawny side, it is highly impossible for you to get back on the Manchester side,” Phillips added.

christopher.thomas@gleanerjm.com