Some vital questions on road works

THE EDITOR: As a follow-up to an article by Richard Deane entitled “All I see is regression,” I ask the following questions:

Is the problem of failure of road surfaces one of poor drainage, poor foundation, poor surface materials, poor workmanship, poor supervision or all of the above?

Has the concrete-asphalt mix to be supplied by Trinidad Lake Asphalt been tested and proven to be suitable for our climate, load factors, etc?

When a contractor is given a job, does he have to sign a bond with a guarantee for a given period of time (say at least five years) which he would forfeit if his performance does not come up to a set standard?

I’ve been told that some of the richest men in TT are the contractors who regularly get jobs to build/repair our roads and bridges. Their huge compounds house hundreds of pieces of equipment but the quality of the work of some of them is viewed by many people as poor. Are the officials that sign off on payments for sub-standard work incompetent, or worse?

Works and Transport Minister Rohan Sinanan “declared that he was fed up of a confusing network of responsibility for roads…” (Newsday, October 10, 2022) but chooses to add a new entity – the Secondary Road Rehab and Improvement Co. Why not pass legislation to remove those departments that are deemed ineffective and strengthen the most efficient of the lot (or are all of them a waste of time)?

In this day and age with the IT resources available to them, why can’t WASA and the various entities responsible for our roads co-ordinate their programmes to avoid roads being repaired and within days WASA digging trenches across and along these newly surfaced roads?

Why can’t WASA use narrow-cutting equipment to get to burst lines rather than backhoes that leave wide, irregular trenches in the roads?

STANLEY LEE POW

via e-mail