The Lord's Ridge Cemetery is now the old cemetery as the city cemetery is now up at mile eleven's Eternal Garden.
But while it is the old cemetery - that doesn't mean the venerable Lord Ridge should be left to the ravages or vandals and the decay of disrepair.
Indeed, as the depository for so many of our dearly departed for so many years, it must be preserved with a dignity becoming the country's largest cemetery.
But, it isn't….Monica Bodden found out more today….
Monica Bodden Reporting
A cemetery should be a place where your loved ones can be put to rest in peace - without having to worry if someone will vandalize their resting place.
But that is not so at the Lord Ridge Cemetery - as we found out.
Today when we visited the cemetery grounds, we noticed a number of tombs destroyed - and some caskets and skeletal remains were even visible.
Wayne Usher- Councilor in charge of public health
"I got a letter from the public health department about a week ago and we work closely with the ministry of health and they went out there on routine checks for dengue and all this type of thing and they came across these graves that were in bad conditions - some of them were open, some of them you can see inside the box and even at least one instance you could see bones."
Usher says - works to fix those tombs are in effect as we speak.
Wayne Usher- Councilor in charge of public health
"I directed this City Administrator to get our people out there quickly and they did an assessment - a rapid assessment of what is needed to rectify the graves - to repair them and according to the city administrator they have already sign off - in terms of the estimates to get the material to fix them. So I can say that at this point we are getting the materials, the sand, the steal, the cement to repair these graves as we speak."
And whether it is vandalism or just poor infrastructure, he told us everyone should do their part and so too will the Council.
Wayne Usher- Councilor in charge of public health
"What we have to do is to try and see how we can save something like this from reoccurring which is going to be quite a challenge for us because the cemetery has been in existence for ever so long from in the 1800s and some of the graves naturally through the environmental conditions and everything have deteriorated in terms of the integrity. Some of them were not built with proper materials. As a matter of fact one of the pictures shown to me - I didn't see any steel on the grave in the picture. I just saw the crumbling rocks and sand and cement but I didn't see steel rods. So that tell me that perhaps there is the absence of steel rods in that one or it wasn't enough or it has corroded overtime, but the point is that is has deteriorated to the point where people more than likely either have vandalize that grave or too many people have stood on that particular grave as it just fell in because of age and the environmental conditions."
Work already started to rebuild the tombs….
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