After a recent public outcry over hundreds of scrap vehicles stored beside the sea in Havers, the Department of Waste Management announced Friday that it has stopped tagging and removing derelict vehicles across the territory until further notice.
“Until we can reinstate our derelict removal services, we would like to encourage the community and wrecker services to cease and refrain from transporting derelict vehicles to the Havers site,” DWM Deputy Director Levi Benjamin said in a press release.
He added that the service interruption is due to delays exporting processed vehicles and challenges identifying a long-term storage site that aligns with the territory’s “social and environmental” requirements.
“We are currently in the middle of the tender process to source the land necessary, which will enable us to resume operations,” Mr. Benjamin said, adding, “We are also focusing our efforts on getting the already stockpiled derelicts out of the territory. This will enable us to clean up and clear the current site in preparation to moving to the new site.”
Background
Derelict vehicles are still piled high on the Havers property despite nine months of government promises to remove them as soon as possible.
The vehicles have drawn angry complaints from area residents, who said during a Jan. 23 meeting that they were moved to the site starting during the holiday season last December.
Health and Social Development Minister Vincent Wheatley explained at the January meeting that the DWM, which his ministry oversees, had previously stored the crushed cars in Pockwood Pond on two acres leased from VI businessman Ashley Ritter.
But after Mr. Ritter informed government of his plan to terminate the contract at the end of last year, the DWM issued two tenders: one to remove the scrap and another to store it elsewhere, Mr. Wheatley said.
He also claimed that he had learned only very recently that the cars would be moved to the Havers land, which in 2021 was purchased by JabberXS Limited, a company owned by Tortola Auto Group Managing Director Shan Mohamed.
Then-DWM director Marcus Solomon told the Beacon in January that Mr. Mohamed responded to a November tender with a bid to store the vehicles on two acres for $8,217 monthly for a one-year period.
This price was comparable to Mr. Ritter’s previous contract to store them on two acres for $4,000 per acre per month, according to Mr. Solomon. The director added that the cost to transport the vehicles from Mr. Ritter’s property, a separate project tendered in July 2024, came to $53,000.
Havers removal
During the Jan. 23 meeting with Havers residents, officials promised to work toward removing the vehicles from Havers as soon as possible.
On March 27, the HSD ministry announced that it had signed a $110,000 contract with Shaquille Stoutt of ENS Excavation Trucking to process and remove the roughly 500 vehicles from the property.
In April, Waste Management Officer Ahdan Doward told the Beacon that the vehicles would be cubed and exported out of the territory by the end of May. “Phase one of the project is to process the vehicles into cubes,” Mr. Doward told the Beacon at the time. “Phase two will include the loading of the cubed cars onto a barge. The final phase of the project is to export the processed materials to international locations to be recycled.”
After that, he stated, the site was to be cleared of by-products and closed.
“As of March 28, 2025, 110 vehicles have been processed,” he said in April. “There are approximately under 390 that are pending.”
In June, however, Mr. Wheatley told the HOA that a total of 642 vehicles had been collected since March and prepared for export. He added that the barge was expected to come the same month, with loading scheduled for completion by June 19.
But to date, massive piles of scrap vehicles remain at the site.
