Forgotten 4 still waiting to get out of ‘unsafe’ Gibson Corner

by Kenton X. Chance Fri, Jul 23, 2010

In a sense, they can be considered the forgotten four of Chrisville, Gibson Corner. They are the last four families still living in that West Kingstown community which the government 12 years ago declared “unsafe”.{{more}}

It is not that these four families don’t want to relocate to the lands in Pembroke that the government allocated to them.

They want the government to put in paved roads, drains, electricity, and water in that South Leeward community, as agreed in the conditions of their relocation.

The plight of the four families began on October 23, 1998, when heavy rains triggered earth movements that destroyed Chrisville’s dream houses, unsettling 28 families.

The then New Democratic Party administration deemed the area “unsafe” and ordered residents to move.

Between the NDP and the Unity Labour Party governments, residents received resettlement deals that included mortgage repayments, land, and some cash in hand.

Residents were given a choice between lands at Pembroke or at Diamond and could take with them any salvageable parts of their Gibson Corner homes.

The lands at Diamond, which were becoming a squatter village, were later regularized and all infrastructure put in place.

The four families still living at Chrisville, Gibson Corner, chose lands at Pembroke – lands, that still have no paved roads, or, in at least one instance, “just a track”.

While electricity and water are available to some of the plots, there is still no drainage, making the unpaved roads, where they do exist, nonnegotiable when it rains.

“Tell dem I ready fuh move. Saying anything else to dem is not going to reach dem,” was the message Kenrick Doyle, 51, wanted to send the Dr Ralph Gonsalves government via SEARCHLIGHT.

“Just put the proper infrastructure in the land and then I will move from here,” Doyle said during a Saturday morning interview at his three-bedroom house, where bundles of steel were wrapped in tarpaulin in his yard.

Doyle’s sentiments were echoed by Judy Stapleton who, in a separate conversation, told SEARCHLIGHT this week that after having had her house broken into 11 times, she has had enough of the “stress” of living at Gibson Corner.

“I ready to move long time,” the 54-year-old housekeeper said, adding: “I can’t wait on government.”

She said there was “just a track” to the lands the government gave her at Pembroke.

“People want to build down there, but they can’t get down to the land and nobody would go there to carry stuff (building material), because it has no road,” Stapleton said.

“If a vehicle goes down into a place, where it is just dirt, you know that is going to be tears for that vehicle to come back out. It is going to skid and stick and all this kind of thing,” Doyle said of the area in Pembroke where his lands are located.

But while Leonard Mayers has some access to his lands and has started construction, he had to put the work on hold because rain water had damaged sections of what he had built.

Dorian Phillips, on the other hand, while waiting for roads to be constructed at Pembroke, spent on two surgeries for himself and healthcare for his epileptic son much of the $30,000 he received from the government.

“Even [if] the [is] road finished, the finances [are] not there to build,” he told SEARCHLIGHT, saying that at 59, financial institutions would not lend him money.

Philips wants the Housing and Land Development Corporation (HLDC) to help him construct a home in Pembroke, saying that his daughters would repay.

“What I built with up there was my savings,” the father of eight said of his three-bedroom home.

In Chrisville, the unpaved roads are getting increasingly narrow because of overgrowth, there is no drainage, and vandals last year stole some of the streetlights.

‘It is about the 11 times they broke my house,” Stapleton told SEARCHLIGHT, adding that thieves dug a hole in her porch in an attempt to enter her two-bedroom home.

On one occasion, they smashed a window of her house and stole food, clothing, and money.

The hurricane season is collective “distress” for the residents.

Mayers was reminded of the dangers of living in the area when a boulder came loose and damaged a section of the concrete roof of his two-bedroom house.

“Yo nah hear dem dun wid we?! Dem dun wid we!” Doyle told SEARCHLIGHT, amidst bouts of laugher, when asked if he was fearful of continuing to live in Chrisville as the hurricane season progresses.

“I have to say so because they are not studying us again. Every time I go to the Permanent Secretary [in the Ministry of Housing and Lands], there is one story,” he offered when he had recomposed himself.

The HLDC was contracted by the government to build the required infrastructure at Pembroke.

“Sometimes when you go in to them, they say that money is the problem, they have no money so it would take a little time to get the road,” Meyers said.

“…Everything you do with government, you have to have road, water and light. And, no water was in, no road was cut and we need drainage,” he said of the lands at Pembroke.

“I will pave them as soon as I can get some funds and it looks to me like that will be soon. I cannot say for sure,” Morris Slater, General Manager of the HLDC, told SEARCHLIGHT of the roads.

Slater said the government was yet to reimburse the Corporation the money the HLDC spent to bulldoze the roads and lay base material to make them motorable for construction purposes.

The HLDC was still awaiting a refund of those monies and funds from the government to pave the roads and build drains.

The 16 persons still living at Chrisville know that they are living in an area that is officially “unsafe”.

They, however, say the damage to their respective houses, which varied from shifted foundations and broken steps to cracked walls, was not sufficient to deem them uninhabitable.

“I am so glad that God spared me so that I was not forced to move. Had I been forced to move, I would have had to go and rent a place to live,” Doyle said.

“…It’s not like I work for this big set of money that I can come and say this house mash up, let me build a next one,” said Phillips, who has worked at LIAT for 25 years.

Doyle on the other hand laments the conditions in which he lives at Gibson Corner.

“Since they deem this place unsafe, nothing has been done to this place. The place gathering all the high grasses, the roads are enclosing because they are not cleaning them, all the big trees clouding the place, having it dark,” he said.

The lands at Gibson Corner were sold to residents without the required infrastructure that the government demands of private land developers.

Doyle notes this fact, but says fighting the government is often a futile undertaking, adding, sometimes you have to “settle for a draw”.

“Government always pussyfooting – carry you around the bend and bring you back so. So, in a case like that, we hadn’t any power as to make them do what we wanted them to do. We just had to lie low and wait and until they come in and fix the road.”

It seems that once again, the residents of Gibson Corner would have to do just that.