On Monday we showed you some high school students from Sunday Wood village who were forced to do a makeshift fix on the Crique Sarco road after the culvert collapsed. They were seen throwing rocks from inside a bus into the hole left by a collapsed culvert so that they could get to school. After he saw it on the Monday Morning Beef, the MIDH CEO, and the ministry quickly solved the problem. We asked Minister Espat about it.
Julius Espat, Minister of Infrastructure Development & Housing
"Thanks to Jules by the way. He alerted us early in the morning. We get information from the media, your good boss Jules has, we are on speed dial for him, so he gets to us pretty fast. Other media houses also contact us. So that's one way of us getting information. Secondly, we get information from the area reps and from the different chairmen of the villages. But you have to understand, we are dealing with thousands and thousands and thousands of culverts throughout the entire country. And so we like when we are informed about our problem, there's one today that we were informed and Bermudian Landing that there is a hole on the road leading up to our bridge, which we are dealing with right now. So when we get the information and we are not aware of it, it's immediately that we send those people to deal with it. Most of the time when the information comes in, it is parallel with what our engineers or guys from the area are sending us. So the information is, we are getting it from all angles. But we believe that it's important for us to know and the media is important because these are the first ones that they normally would call. And so I think we have a very good relationship with the media whereas they are comforted enough to inform us, and we take it positive, we deal with it, that's our job to try to fix all the problems that has to do infrastructure."
Courtney Menzies:
"We were told that Dr Martinez knew about the problem ahead of time, though. Did he not bring it to the ministry?"
Julius Espat, Minister of Infrastructure Development & Housing
"I'm not into reading minds, I don't know what Dr Martinez knew or didn't know. I know that I was informed by my CEO, who was informed by Jules, I think it was six in the morning and we dealt with it by the evening, it was already solve. But with that specific case. So I don't know what the gentleman down south knew, or didn't know."
The collapsed culvert had been brought to the attention of. Area rep Martinez. A week before we tried the video.
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