As the seasonal rains begin to really make their presence felt there is no mistaking the jitteriness among villages along the East Coast corridor. The presence of the Atlantic to the north provides a discomfiting reminder of the floods that ravaged the coast in 2005. Since then, this time of year always engenders a sense of unease.
In 2005 the floodwaters took lives, displaced families and ruined livelihoods and official assurances that this time around the coast is better prepared to face persistent downpours have not quite removed the fear that history could repeat itself.
Ever since the rains began to threaten some weeks ago, Region Four Regional Chairman Clement Corlette has been seeking to provide assurances to be contrary. Just last week he boldly predicted to a reporter on a local television programme that East Coast residents can anticipate a comfortable Christmas. Central government and the various NDCs, he said, has for several months been focusing on clearing the drains and canals that drain the water off the land. At the same time villages along the coast are equipped with a series of impellar pumps that dump the water into the Atlantic Ocean.
The heavy flooding in 2005 was blamed partially on the fact that these pumps malfunctioned at critical times. The Regional Chairman says that that is unlikely to be the case this time around. Most NDCs confirm that pumps assigned to their villages had been serviced as recently as two months ago and that they are capable of working for thirty six consecutive hours before they must be rested.
For those East Coast families who lost everything in 2005, however, seeing is believing. That, at least is the outlook of the Ramsamooj family whose small Better Hope home was completely flooded and its contents destroyed in 2005. Parbattie, a talkative woman and the matriarch of the family is a hardened skeptic.
She lost her mother to what she still insists was a flood-related aliment and she recalls the indignity of families sitting and waiting for relief boats to deliver cooked food to the worst-affected parts of the community. It is, it seems, the indignity as much of the inconvenience of flooding that worries her.
It is the same in other East Coast communities where several houses actually sit on bare ground or are raised no more than a few feet off the ground. For the families living in these houses even a brisk downpour usually results in flooding. For them, a repeat of 2005 would be catastrophic.
With nowhere to go hundreds of poor coastal families must hope that such safeguards as are in place work and that the rains spare them the intensity of 2005. What the experience of 2005 proved is that those safeguards are fragile and inadequate particularly since they include no planned evacuation initiative in the event that the weather becomes dramatically worse. Creating comprehensive infrastructure for large scale weather-related emergencies is a priority which government must clearly move to the very top of its agenda.
Last week the two impellar pumps at Triumph to drain the water from Beterverwagting, Triumph and Mon Repos were working. You could tell not only from the noise emitting from the pump “house” but from the fact that you could actually see water being pumped into the sea. The pumps, the attendant said had been serviced in October and were ready for the test.
You have to live in one of these East Coast villages to appreciate the importance of the pumps. Sometimes they must work so hard to keep the land dry that even at high tide they persist, pumping water into a reservoir that is emptied into the sea when the tide recedes.
The sustained downpour of last Thursday evening which ran into early Friday morning provided a sort of “dry” run for the pumps and for the other systems which officials say are in place to prevent flooding. The test was inconclusive. Some flooding resulted in several villages along the coast. Streets, yards, and “bottom” houses were immersed in several inches of water and up to Sunday morning the evidence of flooding was clear.
If the pumps along the East Coast may have proved that they can indeed work for protracted periods the persistent downpour left residents to wonder whether they can cope with a more sustained assault from the rains.
The rains of late last week have triggered what appears to be the earliest stages of official preparation for an emergency response. Last Friday’s media briefing by the Ministry of Agriculture conceded that the heavy rains of the previous evening and earlier that same morning had dumped three to five inches of rain on the land along the coast and had put the coastal drainage system on “high alert.” The Ministry’s release said that reports of “accumulation of water” (a euphemism for flooding) in several low-lying areas along the coast” had been received and that “possible interventions were being pursued.”
Meanwhile, and despite the earlier assurances given by regional officials that drains and canals had been rendered to cope with the threat of floods, the Ministry’s release said that Prime Minister Samuel Hinds had been assigned to “overlook” the drainage situation on the coast and that “engineers of the National Drainage and Irrigation Authority (NDIA) along with regional officials had been deployed along the coast to monitor the situation.”
Ironically, the high-profile presence of public functionaries while at least providing some semblance of an official response will probably also heighten concern among coastal communities that they may be in for some worrying weeks ahead.
If the heavier rains of recent years are thought to be the primary reason for flooding, there is evidence that many of the victims of the floods may be victims of their own folly and of resource deficiencies in the NDCs. Some villages along the East Coast have unreliable garbage disposal systems, a function, the NDCs say, of a lack of financial resources. At Triumph last week the two impellar pumps were emitting a steady stream of solid waste with the water, evidence of indiscriminate dumping of garbage by residents of the villages.
The available suggests that many of the victims of the 2005 floods have learnt little from their ordeal and that sage garbage disposal remains too expensive for most NDCs to afford. What is also surprising is that despite the experience of just over two years ago the regional administration has not embarked on any sustained public information campaign in the villages along the East Coast as part of its wider flood prevention campaign regarding the fact that blocked drains and canals were thought to be one of the primary reasons why the stagnant water took weeks to recede in 2005.
And if there are no visible signs of preparation by residents to move to less vulnerable areas, the eventuality is certainly under serious discussion in homes where families shudder at the thought of reliving the experience of 2005. You would have had to be part of the experience to understand their anxiety.
