At a community policy forum held Wednesday night at Alexandra School in Speightstown, St Peter, former long-serving St Thomas Member of Parliament Cynthia Forde has sounded the alarm over a spiraling infrastructure crisis in her former constituency, triggered by the simultaneous closure of three major arterial roads. After stepping down from her parliamentary post earlier this year following decades representing the parish, Forde used the public gathering to lay bare the cascading disruption that has left local commuters with no safe alternative routes for daily travel.
“We already had two major arteries closed, and now a third has been shut down. The disruption is completely unprecedented,” Forde told attendees, outlining the crippling impact on local movement. With primary corridors closed for long-overdue repairs, motorists have been forced to divert onto narrow backroads including Jack-in-the-Box Gully and Hangman’s Hill – routes Forde described as inherently unsafe, particularly after dark due to a total lack of street lighting.
The former MP shared that she now avoids traveling within the parish after nightfall out of personal safety fear, and called on national authorities to immediately install new lighting along these diversion routes to cut the risk of crashes and criminal incidents. Beyond inadequate illumination, Forde also blasted the severely deteriorated condition of these secondary roads, noting that deep potholes – which she called large “craters” – are causing consistent damage to local residents’ vehicles, spurring daily complaints from frustrated commuters.
Forde also called out systemic failures in public communication around roadwork plans, pointing out that road closures are often implemented with little to no advance warning for affected communities. She pushed for more proactive, direct engagement between government agencies and the residents whose daily lives are upended by the infrastructure works. Among other long-running unaddressed issues in the parish, Forde highlighted Vaucluse Road, which has been used as an illegal dumping ground for years. She noted the site’s isolated location has already contributed to serious past safety incidents, and despite repeated community appeals, the problem has never been resolved, creating ongoing environmental and public safety hazards.
Responding to Forde’s concerns directly during the forum, Deputy Prime Minister Santia Bradshaw – who previously served as Minister of Transport and Works – did not push back on the criticism, instead openly acknowledging that St Thomas has suffered from systemic underinvestment in infrastructure for generations. “I have to agree that Cynthia is right; St Thomas has been neglected for many, many years, especially when it comes to our road network,” Bradshaw stated.
Bradshaw explained that while the current government has launched a slate of long-overdue road improvement projects across the parish – including upgrades to Cane Garden to Bridgefield Road, Shop Hill Road, and Prior Park – multiple unforeseen challenges have slowed progress dramatically. A core barrier, she noted, has been coordinating infrastructure upgrades alongside utility companies that manage century-old water mains running through the parish’s road corridors. These aging, undocumented water systems require extra work to relocate or repair as part of road projects, leading to repeated work stoppages and extended timelines.
“Some of these projects have started and stalled multiple times over the past few years because of the unexpected complexity that comes up when we start digging,” Bradshaw added. She also conceded that Forde’s criticism of poor communication with residents was valid, particularly given the large scale of ongoing works across the parish. The Deputy Prime Minister noted that after decades of chronic underfunding for St Thomas infrastructure, the government is essentially playing catch-up, and the combination of broad project scope, limited local contractor capacity, and the parish’s challenging terrain has made executing upgrades far more difficult than initially expected.
While offering a formal apology to residents for the extended disruption to daily life, Bradshaw outlined steps the government is taking to mitigate current issues, including deploying new pothole-patching equipment to address secondary road damage and adjusting traffic routing to ease congestion on diversion routes. She ended with a note of cautious optimism, saying that visible progress is finally starting to emerge after years of delay, and gave a formal commitment that the government would strengthen public communication about upcoming road closures and project timelines moving forward.