Updated 1.45pm with IM reply
A much-maligned road in Iklin that has been plagued with problems was unable to keep up with rainfall on Friday morning, with water overflowing from one of its recently-installed gutters.
Residents who live in the area contacted Times of Malta to express their frustration at the latest issue to impact Triq il-Wied, and shared a video of water bubbling up onto the road’s surface.
One of them slammed those responsible as “incompetent”.
“People behind the designs of these roads are nothing but incompetent political appointees who should be relegated to Lego building, not building roads,” fumed Trevor Zahra, who lives nearby.
“It’s unfathomable how the residents of this country allow incompetent people to continue to rape this island and suck money from the people’s coffers, and they then get away with doing a bad job.”
An Infrastructure Malta spokesperson told Times of Malta that the overflow was most likely due to a stormwater pipe having been partially blocked by litter or other material.
Previous rainfalls had not resulted in such a blockage, the spokesperson said, making a litter or debris-caused blockage the likely culprit.
Workers will be using drain inspection cameras to identify the blockage and then flush it out, the spokesperson added.
Works to rebuild Triq il-Wied took around 22 months to complete, with roads agency Infrastructure Malta blaming the delays on a wave of COVID infections impacting the selected contractor.
The much-delayed 1km stretch of road was finally completed in July, but residents were in no mood to celebrate. When minister Ian Borg highlighted the completed works on his social media profile, he ended up getting publicly slammed .
“More than a year to fix a simple road. The Chinese would have built a city. Amateurs,” one Facebook user had told Borg.
But that was not the end of the road’s saga. Just weeks after it was completed, a motorcyclist was left with two cracked ribs and a fractured clavicle after one of the new road’s culverts was dislodged, sending him and his bike flying.
Workers then dug up all the culverts, which were just weeks old, and replaced them with an alternative system which, judging by Friday's overflow, has problems of its own.