Less than two weeks after the start of the predicted heavy rains both the government and the various local authorities across the country have slipped into an emergency mode. Ministers and functionaries of the National Drainage and Irrigation Authority are paying their customary ‘inspection visits’ to the various sluices, kokers and pumps in the vulnerable areas and the public health and economic implications of flooding in some coastal areas is already sufficiently serious to warrant relief intervention.
The state media have already been activated to cover the official assessments of the floods and while the authorities have been doing their best to put a brave face on the situation it is already clear – judging from the impact of the earliest, admittedly heavy downpours – that the assurances provided two weeks ago by the Ministry of Agriculture and the Georgetown City Council that they were equipped to respond to the anticipated bad weather cannot really be relied upon.
In fairness some local authorities declared well ahead of the rains that some measure of flooding was inevitable even though it was probably reasonable to assume that the existing infrastructure would stave off its worst excesses at least for a while. That, sadly, does not appear to be the case.
With the experience of 2005 and 2006 still fresh in the collective public memory there is something distinctly unsettling about what appears to be the inability of the municipal and state authorities to provide reliable assessments of the likely effectiveness of their preparations. True, the rains can be unpredictable in their intensity and emergencies can arise without a great deal of warning. On the other hand, some of the public responses that have been forthcoming in the wake of the recent rains suggest – and the Minister of Agriculture conceded this in an NCN interview on Tuesday evening – that we were probably not as well prepared for the predicted heavy rainfall as we were led to believe.
Immediately following last week’s heavy downpours we learnt that some kokers and sluices were not, after all, in the sort of condition to cope with the challenge of the floodwaters and that some pumps were either defective or were yet to be put in place. And in his NCN television interview Minister Persaud related an odd tale about the top of a dam somewhere in Region Four being ‘sold off’ by the regional authorities, thereby rendering the particular dam vulnerable to overtopping in the event of rising floodwaters.
And yet, for all these weaknesses that ought, patently, to have been discovered and, in most cases, remedied before the start of the rainy season, we were told prior to the start of the rains that almost everything that could possibly have been put in place, given, of course, the known resource limitations, was in fact put in place. In other words, the issue here is not about the deficiencies that arise from a lack of resources but those that arise, it seems, out of sheer negligence.
The City Council, for example, failed to take account of the well-known drainage problems in the city and while the cost of fixing this problem may be beyond the budget of the Council, the assurances of its readiness to respond to flooding appeared not to take sufficient account of what may well be its biggest headache.
During his television interview Minister Persaud juxtaposed two points which may well have summed up at least part of the problem. Having conceded that the authorities may not have done as much preparing as they could have done prior to the start of the rainy season he recommended the setting up of what is perhaps best described as community-based infrastructure monitoring and Flood Watch committees. While one accepts the Minister’s view that threats to the infrastructure are best monitored by the people who live closest to them, could it be that he is also suggesting that those responsible for putting the infrastructure in place cannot be relied upon to do their jobs without having the various communities looking over their shoulders?
In the city, of course, there is the problem associated with effecting a comprehensive clearing of the drains and canals and the even more absurd problem of businesses whose indiscriminate garbage disposal habits bespeak an inexplicable inability to see a nexus between this practice and their own business interests.
What is clear is that when we contemplate the high cost of flooding in both the residential areas and commercial sections of Georgetown, the time-worn excuses of a lack of resources to undertake a major cleanout of the drains canals and alleyways and the refusal by business houses to end the practice of using the drains and alleyways as garbage dumps are no longer acceptable. Ways have simply got to be found to find both the funding and the will to rid the city of clogged drains, canals and alleyways and keep them that way, except we are prepared to ensure the huge financial losses, dislocation and inconvenience that occurs during each rainy season.
The magnitude of the challenge associated with tackling the problem of floods has become much greater with the advent of freakish rains in recent years and no one is suggesting that flooding will not continue to be a challenge in the years ahead. Certainly, from all that we have been told the cost of building effective defences against flooding could run into billions of dollars which means of course that such a system will have to be put in place incrementally. Setting all that aside, however, it still appears that the challenge of building adequate defences against flooding is being made more difficult by the failure of the local and state authorities to undertake some of the preparatory work that lies within its power and the repetitive and, frankly, infuriating excuses that are trotted out for these failures time and time again. Given the high toll that flooding has already taken on our nation, the avoidable deficiencies and the absurd attendant ‘reasons’ cannot be excused any longer.
