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The Ministry of Public Works is examining ways to improve existing airstrips in hinterland and riverine communities. The hope is to improve them so that they are functional during the rainy season.
For a number of years, residents in some hinterland and riverine communities across Guyana have been inconvenienced or unable to travel in and out of the city during the rainy season.
Most of these airstrips are mainly made up of grass and in some cases loom, which ultimately worsen during the rainy season, resulting in no aircraft being able to land in these communities.
This was highlighted by Minister of Public Works Juan Edghill during a recent interview with MTV News Update.
“The problem is when it’s raining, what happens? That’s where the difficulty is. The airstrips in the dry weather, we could land and take off but in the rainy season the pot holes developing, the soft spots develop,” Minister Edghill said.
This in turn affects residents of these communities as they sometimes have to travel out to the city but cannot.
To address this issue, Minister Edghill revealed that the ministry is currently examining ways in which they can make these airstrips better, so they can be able to withstand the rainy season.
“We want to ensure safety and we have to look at how we can make harder surface that could be durable even in the rainy season and we have to be able to get longer airstrips to be able to take in bigger aircraft and that is something that is being studied while we seek to ensure what obtains is maintained and we can keep traffic and expand where we going as a country.”
“This is key because, if we're gonna expand eco-tourism, our airstrips gotta be improved to be able to fly the tourists into the various destinations and eco-lodges and so this is part of our general development.”
In addition, the ministry is in discussions to have fuel farms in the various shuttling areas to bring down costs of transporting goods to the various communities.
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