THA to fix metal drain cover after ex-cop's accident

SEVERAL days after the incident that saw his foot being stuck in a hole in a metal drain cover, retired police officer Marlon Charles is still feeling pain from his injuries.

An Instagram post on November 4 showed Charles’ left foot stuck in a hole in a rotted metal plate. Helpful and curious strangers surrounded him as he sat on the pavement in front of ‘Bago Boyz bar, popularly known as Yung Kow, on Carrington Street, Scarborough. One man hammered around the edges of the hole, hoping to open it wide enough for the 56-year-old Bethel man to remove his foot. As soon as he did so, Charles took off his shoe to massage it.

In a phone interview the next morning, Trevor James, Tobago House of Assembly (THA) secretary of Infrastructure, Quarries and Urban Development told Newsday, “The technical staff will determine what the full solution is, and we are going to attend to the issue in the shortest possible time.”

When Newsday visited the bar around 1 pm on October 5, the  hole was welded shut, but other parts of the same plate were obviously rotting.

Newsday caught up with Charles at the bar on the morning of October 6.

He said although he was wearing boots, he hit his left ankle hard. He suffered two cuts on and near his ankle and was having pain along his instep and “in the bone.”

He said at the time, he only felt embarrassment, but by the next day, he felt the pain, so he intended to visit a doctor soon.

“That hole there for a while now, but people avoid it. But on this occasion, maybe around 5 or 6 pm, I misstepped and my foot went down in the hole and I was stuck.

“I sit down there for about 20 minutes, half an hour, and eventually they pound out the metal around my foot and they freed my foot. Otherwise, that would have been it.”

He said people in the area knew him, so a lot of them rushed to help him, for which he was grateful. He then went home and washed the area with soap.

One customer at the bar said the hole was there for months, and he and others had complained about it on TV and radio programmes, but no one fixed it. He said during Tobago carnival in October, people rolled up some cardboard and stuck it in the hole to highlight it so revellers and pedestrians could be aware and avoid it.

“You know what save him? Is that boots he was wearing save his foot from serious damage.

“And even now, they come and fix it on Tuesday morning and they did shoddy work, because there are two more holes there waiting to expand for somebody foot to go in it again.
"When I was working, no supervisor would accept that stupidness. How they get paid for that?”

Hearing the conversation, one passerby said, “You know how long people complaining about that hole? Look at what it take for them to come fix it.”

But no one could say if an official report was ever made to the THA.

Another man was irate about the incident.
“They ridiculous. It’s obviously rotting, but they just waiting on somebody else to fall down in it before they do anything. As soon as they get the vote, they there in the Parliament and they get the big money, after that we can’t see them again. They don’t care ‘bout we again.”

A woman complained it was tourist season and a visitor could have fallen in. She noted November 5 was the beginning of the cruise-ship season in Tobago and more ships would be coming soon.
She pointed out the obvious, smaller holes in the plate and wondered why it was patched instead of having the whole plate changed. She said people should have called Martin George, chairman of the Tobago Business Chamber, as he would have got it properly repaired.