MORE THAN 100 roofs in the Toco/Sangre Grande constituency were damaged by a storm late on Thursday night.
This according to members of the Disaster Management Unit of the Toco/Sangre Grande Regional Corporation during a media tour of Azalea Circular, Sangre Grande, led by Minister in the Ministry of Housing Phillip Alexander yesterday.
Toco/Sangre Grande Regional Corporation chairman and councillor for the area Kenwyn Phillip was also on the tour assessing damage and speaking with affected residents.
The unit, along with a team from the Housing Development Corporation (HDC) led by Alexander, toured the area to assist with the assessment of damage, with the aim of expediting the grant application process for repairs to damaged homes.
“All of the teams together are going to communicate as we get information from all of the homeowners as to who needs what. And everybody’s going to, based on their responsibility, handle what needs to be handled, work together, overlap and make sure that all of the people who got damaged in this situation, that they get some relief,” Alexander said.
The minister was asked what the HDC could do given that most of the homes were mortgaged.
“The situation with the roofs, we have a technical team, they’re going to help (residents), guide them forward.... We (the Housing Ministry) do have relief grants, so we can work from that point of view, outside of what the Sangre Grande Regional Corporation and the Member of Parliament for the area, so there are a lot of groups working here.”
Meanwhile, Phillip emphasised that there were different agencies that offered different grants.
He said: “We have Self-Help that normally assists with materials. We have Social Services that normally deals with the appliances and so on. The corporation itself doesn’t necessarily give out the grants.”
Speaking about the role of the regional corporation in offering relief to affected residents, Alexander said: “What we do is we try to assist with the temporary relief so the families can have some comfort. Displacement. I know some families that were displaced that the Member of Parliament (Wayne Sturge) would have hosted them in his office.”
‘Just like that the roof was gone’
Two of the affected residents also spoke about their experiences.
One of them, Joel Spence, had his roof partially blown off.
He recalled: “We were supposed to go to Paramin (Thursday). I had to go out the road and came back home; the rain started to fall and it started to blow into the bedroom there.
“So, we were trying to see about that and then that thing happened so quickly. So, we heard the winds when I looked outside, we saw the coconut tree bowing, then I ran back inside. And by the time we tried to attend to the rain wetting the bed on the inside, we just noticed light came, an abundance of light, and just like that the roof was gone.”
He said: “Rains came in wetting up all the beds; all three of the beds were wet so we have (mattresses) outside trying to dry.
“I had to sleep on the floor last night, my wife slept on a blow-up bed and we have one room available, my stepson slept on the couch; my son, well, his room is the only room that was not impacted, so he slept on his bed.”
The other resident, Mary Parris, said: “The rain started to fall and we started to see the side of the roof go up and down.
“It kept going up and down about three times and then the whole roof go ‘whoop’, and it gone straight that way and went all the way up by a neighbour’s house up there,” she said, pointing through a window.
She continued: “And then my grandchildren came running downstairs because they were scared and bawling. And then one of my small grandson came running and the breeze blew him down.”
She said she grabbed him as bricks were falling from a beam upstairs.
“If that beam came down on him and I, both of us would not have been here right now,” she said.
She said her grandson was hit on his back with a red brick and got scratches on his hand and foot.
Parris said he was taken to the hospital and treated for minor injuries and was “okay now”.
“It was a terrible experience and I was traumatised,” she added.
