Historical Crooked Tree Village Gets Infrastructural Upgrade

Prime Minister John Briceño

Crooked Tree is one of the oldest Creole villages in Belize, but while it has its historical features, it also has its challenges. Naturally low-lying, the village’s lagoon acts as a basin in the rainy season, so when the rains are incessant, flooding becomes a problem and parts of a reconstructed causeway can be impassable. But over the past few months, the Ministry of Infrastructure Development, already swamped with deteriorating streets and roadways from before Hurricane Lisa, has been upgrading the causeway. Prime Minister John Briceño toured several projects in the Belize District last Friday. Crooked Tree was one of them, starting from the roundabout and all the way into the village. He shared what is the plan for the village.

Prime Minister John Briceño

“I was most impressed because what Minister Espat has been doing by carefully managing the finances for this road, they’ve managed to save enough money to fix the entire road into the village. Approximately two point four miles – a section is going to be lifted about five feet from where it is right now with fill, and that’s also going to be paved. The last mile is not going to be paved, simply because that area will need a lot of work and quite likely we will have to build a causeway because of how the water runs and the ground is very soft. That would take a little bit of studies and even looking at the connection between the Crooked Tree Lagoon and the Northern Lagoon in the Orange Walk District. They were pointing out to me that these two are connected but in some instances, water from the Northern Lagoon flows into the Crooked Tree Lagoon and creates even more flooding, so the thinking is even maybe having to put a dam there to control the flow of the water. And of course I went to visit the museum that they have in Crooked Tree and I found out that in Crooked Tree they found evidence that there were people living there even before the Mayas, like about ten thousand years ago. To me, I didn’t even realized that, first time I heard about that.”