The rains have been unusually heavy for the last three weeks - and it has left streets and roads all over the country in a state of ruin. And even in Belize City - where 93 streets have been cement-paved, dozens of the older roads have been run to ruin by the rains. The city has 520 streets - to fix all of them would have cost about 90 million dollars - and so even though we're coming up on 100 new streets for 18 million dollars, that's only about 20% of the entire picture. And so tonight, those that were cement paved remain in good condition, while the older streets are a disaster. The mayor told us about City Council's plan to remedy the situation as soon as possible:...

Mayor Darrell Bradley
"We are going to put hard core material on 17 streets that we had already identified and we did that as a result of these heavy rains. In the south side our people are out during the course of this week to do the kind of remedial work in terms of patching of streets and trying to get it at least bearable."

"We've seen areas of significant deterioration; I did an inspection in front of St. John's College, we have seen the flag monument round-about being degraded to almost horrendous conditions. There is an area along Vernon Street; the entire length of Vernon Street is one that we want to concrete, so we are going to start the first section of that very shortly. We're also going to cement the flag monument round-about and we are working with BWS to upgrade the areas by St. Johns College so that we could fix that area relatively soon."

Jules Vasquez
"Which is your highest priority at this time?"

Mayor Darrell Bradley
"Our highest priority would really be the round-about areas. I think the area in front of St. Johns College is an area which is atrocious and that needs to be dealt with urgently. I've notice when I was doing the inspection that what people do is actually flow across the flow of traffic into the other lane which is dangerous and so we want to ensure that we target that. The flag monument round-about, that's something that we wanted to finish along with the Freetown Road project. We held off because of the clamoring in terms of traffic congestion; now that the Coney Drive round-about is finish, we are able to do that. Several of the contractors that we are talking to indicate to us that they could do that work in 2 days at most."

"Vernon Street again, because of its importance to the city as an area where people exit the downtown from - that a major street that we would want to focus on. All 3 of those roads will get started on within the next week or so."

Jules Vasquez
"Looking at streets like Neal Pen Road, that from a citizen's perspective is painful because I know that it has been paved within the year and it's not even a full year that it's been paved and its already in a significant state of deterioration."

Mayor Darrell Bradley
"That's project that came under the central government. That was done through the Ministry of Works. The City Council did not have any hand in the supervision or the construction of that road, but we already have our personnel looking at Neal Pen Road to see what kind of remedial work needs to be done there in terms of repair, so that we don't have these pot holes expand. It's only a small area of the road that has pot holes, but since it has recently finished we did not expect that for at least a couple years."

"It is concerning to me that we have infrastructure that cannot weather even heavy rains of about 2 weeks which worries me because if we have a hurricane we will be in serious trouble."

City residents will know that Central American Boulevard and the Western Highway near the cemetery are also in ruinous states of disrepair. These are the responsibility of the Ministry of Works, though, not the City Council.

Presently, cement paving will commence on Douglas Jones Street and the Newtown Barracks in front of BTL Park.

Channel 7