Letter of the Day | Where are the road engineers?
Published:Saturday | June 15, 2024 | 12:06 AM
THE EDITOR, Madam:
There is a sense of irrationality that defies good governance in the process of the granting of building permits in the town of Mandeville by the Manchester Parish Municipality. Of particular concern are construction within areas whose sinkholes are dumped up and proper drainage management not implemented.
Whenever the town experiences heavy or persistent rainfall, certain roads around the town, including Ward Avenue (before Scotiabank), deCarteret Road (near Belair School), Newleigh Road (before Phil’s Hardware), and Manchester Road, just before reaching the roundabout after passing the soldier camp, have been flooded over the decades. All this, in my opinion, reflects the collapse of good engineering and the waste of taxpayers’ money paid to persons or companies who lacked the critical skills in road building.
There is a deafening silence by the mayor and the National Works Agency (NWA) concerning the inconvenience meted out to both drivers and pedestrians who traverse these flooded corridors. One area I wish to highlight is on Newleigh Road, opposite Phil’s Hardware. Its unremitted flooding is a gross inconvenience experienced by commuters.
When are we going to see urgent action by the State to address these flooding nuisances?
It was just three years ago the member of parliament for central Manchester spent millions of dollars to resurface roads in the constituency, only to see many of these corridors returning to a state of disrepair, due to no or poor drainage.
My greatest fear in the SPARK initiative to address unrepaired roads is it will end up as a waste of taxes, if we continue to have no guaranteed standards, including drainage, to prevent the destruction of our roads when it rains.
We ought to have all roads placed under the oversight of the Office of Utilities Regulations (OUR), “as a significant reform in the management of our public roads” (see ‘Put roads under OUR’, The Gleaner, May 7), as neither government nor the local municipality have the guts to hold contractors to account.
DUDLEY MCLEAN II
Mandeville, Manchester