Another Lesson And Warning For Mullins Bay

Recently there has been a spate of vehicle accidents in the Mullins Bay area some of which regrettably involved fatalities. Luckily that was not the case yesterday in the accident pictured above. It allegedly was caused by a motorist not taking due care while exiting the parking lot of the East Moon Chinese Restaurant thus forcing the oncoming northbound vehicle to take evasive action which ended up in the significant property damage pictured. It could have easily been much worse as the accident occurred at a very busy bus stop for locals and visitors heading into Speightstown and points north.

With more and more traffic on the road and more and more visitors taking to rental cars it should now be an imperative that all should slow down when passing through the area. It cannot be overemphasized that extreme caution should be exercised on this main road by both motorists and pedestrians as the road is narrow and winding. Special attention needs to be paid to the crossing by the beach bar which also needs to be more clearly identified and parking even briefly around that spot should absolutely not be tolerated. Likewise overtaking in the area (the suspected cause of the two high profile recent fatal accidents) should be banned. Mini-buses (PSVs or yellow buses) should be specially monitored as they are the main source of most of the frustration many motorists experience in the area.

Storm drains should be cleaned and covered. There should be no excuse that in 2008 in one of the most sought after beach destinations in Barbados that there is an open sewer (aka storm drain) on the landside of the road from the Texaco service station to the former Kings Beach Hotel; not to mention that it was only cleaned once in the last year and a half and that there is a virtual tropical rainforest growing within it. Locals and visitors alike are forced to bob and weave their way along this stretch to avoid being knocked down by vehicular traffic. That drain may have been state of the art when it was built in the late 1950s - early ‘60s when the area was still a fishing village with sugarcane fields fronting a road still traversed by donkey carts, but it is deadly pit in today’s tourism economy. Yesterday’s accident and the recent other deadly ones in the area should be lessons and warnings - not just curiosities. As we can see even in the above photo there are visitors using this road every day, and while not minimizing the lives of the locals who died on the road recently, do we really want to be reading about them losing their lives on this road in the New York Times or the London Telegraph?


Jentillia