We are the Police
08/02/08 22:06 Filed in: Musing
Walking past the construction site, I
hear the muttering, "feel he own the road."
I know exactly what the guys are talking about and as a matter of fact, I do have investments in the road they happen to be talking about. And so do you.
Sledge Construction has been doing some quick and admirable work on a new house around the corner from me at the junction of Luckput Street and Carlton Avenue.
But at what cost? Nobody would like to be moving into a house these guys built after they managed to piss off everyone on the block.
The work has been fast and focused on the construction but almost no attention has been paid to the community in which the work is taking place. Right from the start, as the land was being cleared, the bulldozer completely demolished the pavement and the entire section had to be cordoned off with a makeshift wall that effectively made foot traffic in front of the western side of the construction site impossible.
But no worries, as the work progressed and the foundation was laid it became clear that there was no plan for containing the work on the jobsite as raw materials were summarily dumped on the northern sidewalk and large trucks ran up on the sidewalk to discharge materials, breaking up the sidewalk as the work progressed.
But even that wasn't to be the limit of the lack of concern for people passing by in the street as the work moved further off the jobsite into the middle of the street for cement mixing.
Now the corner of Luckput Street and Carlton Avenue is a hub for traffic going north off Mucurapo Road and east to merge back into the main traffic along the Western Main Road, here.
From around three o'clock in the afternoon, traffic begins to pile up here alarmingly and with a casual insouciance, I found these young men repeatedly mixing cement as lines of traffic crawled by their construction work with no care for the chaos that was building up around them.
So I stopped one day and pointed out what their carelessness was causing. This was not received well, so I called the Construction company to complain.
Then I kept doing it, asking for the senior people on the job next to make the point that what they were doing was both avoidable (concrete can be mixed equally well onsite if you lay down used plywood with galvanise sheeting over it) and not a little bit uncivil.
That's how I became the guy who feels he owns the road, but here's the thing, we all do. I live here in St James, in Port of Spain in Trinidad and Tobago and the only way that we can establish who really owns this country is to step up and claim it.
The wife thinks I'm going to get hurt doing this, but how much hurt will we all have to endure trying to ignore a blizzard of casual instances of carelessness, incivility and loutishness that demands to be called out as the nastiness that should be shouted down until it's no longer cool to fail to care about the people who share this island with you.
I know exactly what the guys are talking about and as a matter of fact, I do have investments in the road they happen to be talking about. And so do you.
Sledge Construction has been doing some quick and admirable work on a new house around the corner from me at the junction of Luckput Street and Carlton Avenue.
But at what cost? Nobody would like to be moving into a house these guys built after they managed to piss off everyone on the block.
The work has been fast and focused on the construction but almost no attention has been paid to the community in which the work is taking place. Right from the start, as the land was being cleared, the bulldozer completely demolished the pavement and the entire section had to be cordoned off with a makeshift wall that effectively made foot traffic in front of the western side of the construction site impossible.
But no worries, as the work progressed and the foundation was laid it became clear that there was no plan for containing the work on the jobsite as raw materials were summarily dumped on the northern sidewalk and large trucks ran up on the sidewalk to discharge materials, breaking up the sidewalk as the work progressed.
But even that wasn't to be the limit of the lack of concern for people passing by in the street as the work moved further off the jobsite into the middle of the street for cement mixing.
Now the corner of Luckput Street and Carlton Avenue is a hub for traffic going north off Mucurapo Road and east to merge back into the main traffic along the Western Main Road, here.
From around three o'clock in the afternoon, traffic begins to pile up here alarmingly and with a casual insouciance, I found these young men repeatedly mixing cement as lines of traffic crawled by their construction work with no care for the chaos that was building up around them.
So I stopped one day and pointed out what their carelessness was causing. This was not received well, so I called the Construction company to complain.
Then I kept doing it, asking for the senior people on the job next to make the point that what they were doing was both avoidable (concrete can be mixed equally well onsite if you lay down used plywood with galvanise sheeting over it) and not a little bit uncivil.
That's how I became the guy who feels he owns the road, but here's the thing, we all do. I live here in St James, in Port of Spain in Trinidad and Tobago and the only way that we can establish who really owns this country is to step up and claim it.
The wife thinks I'm going to get hurt doing this, but how much hurt will we all have to endure trying to ignore a blizzard of casual instances of carelessness, incivility and loutishness that demands to be called out as the nastiness that should be shouted down until it's no longer cool to fail to care about the people who share this island with you.
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