On November 25, life changed for Mala Agostini, her sister, Sheila Balgobin, and their 86-year-old mother, Basdaye Roopchand, who suffers with diabetes and high blood pressure, after they woke up and saw their home on the brink of collapse to a landslip.
Agostini and her family live at Indian Trail, Couva. Her mother has lived there for the past 60 years. Two years ago they rebuilt the house and according to her “everything was fine.”
She said: “We have done our drainage and we have ensured that our water does not run to the back of the house as it is a slope. However, there is no drainage in the area and all the water from the homes in that area and the rain water flow to the bottom of that hill as there is nowhere else for it to go.”
Agostini told the Enterprise Desk that nothing was happening before to indicate what they would have awoken to on November 25.
“When they got up that morning and saw the slippage,” she said, “I immediately started to make calls to the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Management (ODPM), the Couva/Tabaquite/Talparo Regional Corporation and the Disaster Management Unit.”
She said she went to the regional corporation on November 26 to see the engineer who sent someone to see what she wanted. She said it was only on the intervention of the chairman of the corporation, Henry Awong, whom she called, that the engineer visited to see what was happening.
When the road engineer at the regional corporation visited the site he was shocked and reportedly told them it was a national disaster.
Agostini is now appealing to the Ministry of Works to help fix the problem before something worse happens. She said: “We need the Ministry of Works to get involved, the regional corporation says it is bigger than they can handle.”
She said the house was now on the brink of collapse and her mother who once had a small home garden was afraid to walk outside.
The land is slipping and they have used blue tarpaulin as a shield but a private engineer retained by the family told them the entire hill was collapsing.
He told them that a retaining wall could be built to save their home but the bigger issue, according to Agostini, was the lack of proper drainage in the area which the Ministry of Works needed to fix. She added: “Nobody in the area ever lobbied the ministry for drains and they themselves never saw it as a problem because nobody complained.”
Agostini said Roopchan Seenath, a Works Supervisor 3 from the Ministry of Works, visited the site on December 18. He told them he had to prepare a report and send it back to the engineer for his action.
However, he could give no indication as to when the engineer would come to see for himself what was happening and what remedial work was required.
Roopchan has assured that a plan was being done for the area but he could give no details of the plan. Agostini is hoping that something is done quickly.
Agostini: “We have been having sleepless nights, especially when it rains. This is very nerve-wrecking” and the recent heavy rains have made them even more fearful of what could happen. The landslip threatens the homes of five other families.”