by RICHARD GODDARD

THE TRAGIC COLLAPSE of a section of the apartment at Arch Cot Terrace, Brittons Cross Road, St Michael on August 26 and the death of five members of the Codrington family, should serve as a wake-up call to the politicians, the Town Planning Department and the emergency services.

Do not allow construction on any area of Barbados before making sure the foundations are stable by doing bore hole tests to some depth, depending on the building plan for that site. Ordinary two-storey houses, say to about 25 feet, but six-storey apartment blocks would be 150 feet.

Ensure the area does not have a history of flooding, as in Sunset Crest. Do not construct in areas endangered by massive landslips or rock falls, like the Scotland District.

I have "caved" in Barbados since 1970 when I was introduced to caving by Ole Sorensen, my neighbour and friend in Graeme Hall Terrace since the early 1950s.

The geology of Barbados shows an island of 115 000 acres, of which six/sevenths is coral stone; that it is 300 000 years old, and honeycombed with thousands of caves, ranging in size from small pocket caves, to the massive Bowmanston Cave, which is over one-and-a-half miles long, and 300 feet below ground level.

The Barbados Water Authority has pumped water from this Bowmanston Cave since the 1880s. Entry to the cave is gained at the Bowmanston Pumping Station where four persons at a time are lowered by a winch in a bucket three feet by three feet, with persons standing in the bucket, and holding on to the cable for dear life.

The winch lowers you 280 feet into the well: a dam flooded with water through a man-made tunnel for 200 feet. The tunnel is about six feet wide and seven feet deep, and completely dark.

My team, with compass and measure, mapped the cave over two separate days. Frank "Froggie" Gibbons, land surveyor, plotted on a Barbados topographical map, the route. It disappeared into a hole too small to enter west of Bowmanston Pumping Station at Kendal Plantation, St John, a distance of about a mile.

The cave varied in size from narrow passages of five feet wide and ten feet high, to 20 feet wide and 50 feet high, with water flowing constantly.

There are several other popular caves around Barbados, with Harrison's Cave developed as a tourist attraction in the 1970s, and becoming the main tourist attraction today. Cole's Cave in St Thomas is also well known.

In recent months a six-storey building in Paynes Bay, St James, under construction, began to crack, as it was about to be completed. Tests showed that it had been built on a cave system, and 180 mini-piles had to be drilled 150 feet deep at great cost, to save the building.

I know of similar houses which had been built over caves on the coral cap in many parts of Barbados.

l Richard Goddard is a farmer and environmentalist.