In cutting the 12-foot wide road about quarter-mile inland and overlaying it with hundreds of tonnes of sand from Sandy Beach, they cut down white and red mangroves, destroying the habitats of the yellow warbler, cut huge swaths through another section of the mangrove forest to access to the main lake on Barbados' newest ecotourism site, and opened the possibility of an ecological and economic disaster in the event of use of the emergency outfall pipe from the sewage plant.

The objective was to alleviate flooding on the eastern side caused by years of lack of maintenance of the drainage canals but that work went ahead without full environmental considerations, a Government officer admitted.

The new road followed the path of a smaller track that existed years ago. Environmentalists have cried out at the lack of ecological sensitivity, especially given the fact that the Graeme Hall Swamp was the last stand of coastal mangroves to survive the chainsaws of developers. Executive officer of the Barbados Marine Trust Loreto Duffy-Mayers said she was shocked at the extent of the destruction and though the trust appreciated the need for the drainage works felt that instead of just treating symptoms, a more holistic management approach was needed for the entire ecosystem which was now split in two parts: The eastern side on which the South Coast Sewerage plant and its emergency outfall pipe were located and the western side which was the home of the ecotourism attraction - the Graeme Hall Nature Sanctuary.

Engineer in charge of the works, Tyrol Inniss of the Drainage Unit, said it was a necessary evil. They had to cut a road wide enough to get heavy duty equipment far enough into the swamp to cut channels to drain the flood waters from the spring-fed eastern side into the lake at the Graeme Hall Nature Sanctuary which was the drainage pattern many years ago. On the beach side, they were having a problem with a build up of sand so they trucked it into the swamp as a surface cover for the road which was now to be stabilised with boulders to minimise sand washing into the swamp.

Manager of the sanctuary Roger Sweeney said they were concerned about implications for the water quality on the western side for which they were accountable to Government. The water on the Government side was low in salinity and any rush of that water into the lake would be too dramatic a shock for marine species, severely impacting them. Another major issue was the emergency outflow pipe for the sewage plant. In the event of a plant shutdown, all the sewage will be dumped into the swamp and with a link between the east and west, that sewage will flow into the eco-tourism attraction creating an economic and ecological disaster.