NATIONAL Mining Syndicate (NMS) President, Renrick Solomon, is echoing a call for government to repair the Puruni trail to facilitate faster and more affordable transportation services into mining districts accessible through it.

The Guyana Chronicle understands that the trail is used as the main access road for hundreds of backdams within the Puruni/Mazaruni mining district.

According to Solomon, some sections of the trail are so bad they are impossible to traverse.

Several years ago, it was in a usable state. Minibuses worked the Bartica to Puruni route and individuals even travelled into the Puruni landing and even to Turtle Creek Mazaruni, using either their own cars or taxis.

Now only bush trucks and land cruisers traverse the area.

Solomon recalled that during a meeting with Natural Resources Minister, Raphael Trotman,on March 29, the minister said road repairs would be done “shortly” along the Puruni road from Iterballi to Pappyshow.

The trail has deteriorated in recent years, placing a heavier financial burden on miners within the areas. Solomon explained that more fuel is consumed by trucks and land-cruisers and those vehicles take longer than usual to travel the route.
“Transportation cost goes up when the road is in that kind of state… usually (it) is $120,000 for a charter, now is $200, 000,” Solomon told The Guyana Chronicle.

Mining operators who purchase fuel within the districts now also have to pay more for fuel.

He said the entire Upper Mazaruni – from Kurupung to Apaiqua – also uses the trail for main access, as well as the Makapa backdam.

In a letter to the Editor published earlier this week, Secretary of the NMS, Leon Moses, said the deplorable state of the Puruni trail is distressing to miners and the slothful process in getting it repaired is unacceptable.

In the letter, Moses said he was expressing the “distress and the plight of miners who contribute significantly to the (Gross Domestic Product) GDP of this country. We pay a lot of royalties to the GGMC, which are supposed to be for the purpose of enhancing the mining industry. Roads are very important to miners in gaining access to their work lands”.

The letter stated that the trail is “one of the major roads” within the district and is currently in a deplorable state.

CLOSED OPERATIONS
The writer said while the national budget has already made accommodations for the Puruni trail construction project, “at this point, many miners have closed their dredges because it is very expensive and impossible to access their work ground. The road is impassible, trucks are being covered in slush, bikes and cruisers cannot pass and people are being stranded”.

He added: “Miners do not know who is responsible for the repairs and maintenance of roads and bridges. But at this moment, many of them need urgent attention. The syndicate body is appealing to the rightful authorities, to have these roads urgently dealt with because people’s lives are disrupted, vehicles are damaged and the journey that takes hours now takes days. This is a real nightmare and is unacceptable.”

Meanwhile, an article published in The Guyana Chronicle on March 14, 2017, noted that engineers had recently completed an assessment of an area, and several bridges and roadways linking Bartica and several other Region Seven (Cuyuni-Mazaruni) mining communities to Puruni will be repaired.

The article quoted Public Infrastructure Minister, David Patterson, as saying then, “a team just came out of the area this week; they were doing an assessment so as to repair them; they came out on Thursday,” Patterson said, adding that works will begin soon.

A truck driver along the trail had spoken to this publication in March.
“This situation is getting from bad to worse. I don’t know what it is going to take for the government to fix this road and these bridges; this is a disaster waiting to occur…. It would be nice to see the government taking action to fix this roadway, because miners have to use this road on a daily basis… I really hope that the road is fixed soon, because any day now these roads could give away.”

The truck driver said many of the bridges along the route have become rotten, maybe due to the bad weather and what he deemed to be reckless use of the roadway and bridges.