Lack of drainage worsens with ‘cut’

‘Naked sore dressed with gravel’

Shoreline property owner Gene Wong has challenged the sub contractor that buries pot holes along the street outside the Daily Post offices to talk to the Korean Kia Motors company owner to agree for a new drain to be built alongside his complex to allow the waters that collect in the street there to be drained into the sea so that he can tarseal the road.

Wong who owns the property behind Kia Motors said he has no problem with having a drain built along the borderline of his boundary down to the sea.

“As long as the Public Works Department or the sub contractor pays for the project then I have no problem with the initiative at all”, he said.

In fact the floodwaters also affect his lawn so a new drainage system is going to benefit everyone in the area.

The stretch of street going past the Daily Post offices has been used as an example by a number of complainants of the deteriorating conditions of the streets in and out of the National Capital.

The Public Works sub contractor who ‘cut’ away the rutted tarsealed stretch has left a ‘naked sore dressed with gravel’ and the wound is getting deeper and deeper with the new rains as drivers continue to splash their way over it.

If nothing is done to drain out the water that collects along the stretch, it is going to end up in a worse state than before the cut was made. At this stage the sub contractor won’t re-tarseal the patch as long as there is no system in place to drain away the flood waters that flow down all the way from the VMF, Lycee Antoine de Bougainville and Anabrou.

A spokesman for the sub contractor said the problem they face is that the original drainage system is blocked and the best solution is to dig a new drainage system to drain the waters into the sea.

But he said the problem is that the private leaseholders of the shoreline plots won’t allow their properties to be used to lay the drain to the shore.

Asked to help the sub contractor out of the long standing issue, a prominent civil engineer who asked not to be named said in order to resolve the issue, it is important to know how the problem started. He said, “After independence when the idea for land reclamation was first encouraged, some shoreline developers did the right thing by working in line with the law to reclaim land along the shore. This meant they made sure that the original drains that led to the sea were left intact to continue to drain out waste water into the ocean to this day.

“However with regard to the original drainage system that used to remove the water from along the street outside the Daily Post, it seems that it was blocked through land reclamation which is why the water there cannot go away.

“The best option is for the sub contractor to negotiate with the private leaseholders for a new drainage system to be dug alongside the shoreline plots”.

Wong whose property stands on the shoreline behind Kia Motors that borders the problematic street said he has no problem with having a drain which goes down to the sea along the borderline of his boundary. He challenged the sub contractor to talk to the Korean owner of Kia Motors to allow the new drain to be built.

The stretch of road that the sub contractor ‘cut’ to bury the pot holes is approximately 50 metres long and cost the Government 601,500 vatu.