PM assures repairs coming to bad roads

Government is on course to bankroll what Prime Minister Mia Mottley has described as a “massive onslaught” on potholes across the country amid strong public outcry about poor road conditions.

At the final Parish Speaks town hall meeting for the year, on Tuesday night at Solidarity House, where residents from St Michael repeatedly called for urgent fixes, Mottley conceded that roadworks are needed across the entire country.

But she warned Barbadians to put the brakes on expectations that every road must be done all at once.

“It can’t happen, it will not happen,” she said, pointing to the high cost and the government’s obligation to respond to other issues.

“I want us to do a reality check . . . because at the same time you’re going to tell me we need to spend money at the hospital and make sure that when people need medicines they can get it, and we need to spend money at the schools when the schools need fixing or whatever the problems are.”
Mottley further reminded Barbadians that recent, persistent heavy rains have not only stalled the process but washed away repairs in some areas.

Over the last two days, Prime Minister Mottley, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Transport, Works and Water Resources (MTWW) Minister Santia Bradshaw and teams from the depots have been meeting to map out plans to address the situation.
The work will be conducted on two levels.

According to Mottley, with an investment in new equipment for the MTWW, the depots will conduct work on small roads while large contractors will focus on major projects such as Highway 7 where work started in earnest on Monday night.

“We’re trying to see how we can do something called small roads by being able to put packages of equipment together [for MTWW teams to work]. We’ve started a few…. Those depots hopefully will be able to do more on their own so that the large contractors can focus on the highways and the major roads that have to be done and we don’t leave small roads where people live,” she said.

In recent weeks, Barbadians have posted creative memes on social media to highlight the major potholes across the island, but the prime minister noted that the problem was exacerbated by the relentless downpours over the last two months.

Deputy Chief Technical Officer of Design Services at the MTWW Jason Bowen agreed the wet conditions have been a major issue, saying there has been little work as a result.

“We cannot pave or do much patching in wet conditions with what we have. So with that in mind, we can see more holes would have appeared relative to the amount of rainfall and we could not patch further, so that is why we would have had this proliferation of potholes at this point in time,” he explained.

Prime Minister Mottley added that Barbadians must recognise that times have changed, pointing to the impact of climate change.

“The intensity of the rain that’s coming down in the shortness of the period that it is coming down in is doing real, real damage and there is nothing that we can do to stop it, but we have to build in the future for it,” she said.

She said the government is moving ahead with constructing concrete roads, which are more durable, to replace current asphalt roads.

“The concrete roads may cost a little more upfront, but they’re going to last longer than the asphalt…. For every concrete road we do, you could probably build two to three asphalt roads, but the asphalt roads ain’t worth nothing. As soon as the rain comes, what is happening – erosion, erosion, erosion. So we now have to take a different approach,” Mottley said.

The prime minister also announced that her administration was conducting a thorough assessment of the island’s infrastructure with the help of an official from the Caribbean Development Bank.

She said this would “help us review all of our standards, all of the angles, everything because how we built our infrastructure in the past can no longer protect us going forward.”
(BT)