It seems there will never be an end to the blatant abuse of the citizens of this country. After two days of rainfall, in which according to Prime Minister Sam Hinds some eight inches were recorded, citizens found themselves in a situation very close to the 2005 Great Flood occurrence. Despite there being the much vaunted Doppler weather station at Timehri, warnings for citizens in low-lying areas to take precautions were only given after the water had already risen. As a result, there was no time for any preparation and only those persons who were so traumatized by what happened in 2005, and are still terrified of a recurrence would have taken any precautions at all. Those who believed the ‘Nancy story’ that 2005 was an aberration would have been those people who would have been found yesterday hanging out carpets to dry and counting their livestock and farm losses.
The Mayor and City Council (M&CC) should squarely accept the blame for what happened in Georgetown. Yes, some citizens do litter, but the city has been so mismanaged for so long that an entire generation has never seen Georgetown entirely clean. Mayor Hamilton Green has for years put forward plans which he and the council have never been able to carry out and possibly never will because of several stumbling blocks put in their way by the central government. Normal people, when faced with such frustration, resign. But the Mayor and his councillors, like every other politician in this dear land of ours, have chosen to hold on until the bitter end. And bitter it is; just ask any city resident who has just spent the last two days in an uncomfortable, dank house, bailing dirty water, or cleaning up after it drained off for the umpteenth time. It’s akin to being constantly battered by an abusive spouse and receiving no redress from the authorities.
And then, even as the water rose in persons’ yards and homes, came a statement from the Office of the Prime Minister, to wit: “Our drainage system is functioning and 24 hours surveillance is being conducted to ensure maximum drainage. We recognise that some homes of the city and outlying areas may have accumulated water.” The Americanism, ‘baloney,’ is the only polite word to describe such a statement. Drains and canals clogged by garbage, weeds, mud and years of neglect could never constitute a functioning drainage system. Perhaps the Prime Minister meant to say that the pumps are working as they should. But it does not take an engineer to figure out that if there is above-normal rainfall, then relief measures should be put in place and urgently. There ought to have been several more pumps put into operation and by now—six years after 2005, there should have been a few more pumping stations along the coast. Surely the billions being poured into D&I could have allowed for this.
The point is that there will never be effective drainage in the city and elsewhere as long as the current slapdash approach to clearing drains and canals continues.
The fact is that the city was built with a web of concrete drains and canals into which rainwater accumulated and which were drained at the next scheduled koker opening. The fact is that for the last two decades or more these drains and canals have been filled almost to the top with sedimentation so that in several areas, little more than a drizzle presents a threat of overtopping. Eight inches are bound to bring about a flood.
The hapless farmers at Laluni, where the creek has not been cleared since in the late 1970s, as some of them recall, are probably not aware that the drainage system is functioning effectively.
One wonders too if the conservancies are being managed as carefully as they could be since they are too often at critical levels. The National and Drainage and Irrigation Authority ought to know beforehand how much rainfall is expected and have a plan in place to deal with it. Persons in several communities in Region 4—just as they did in 2005—complained of seeing water flowing in from the backlands. As they did back then, the authorities will no doubt deny now that the water came from the East Demerara Water Conservancy, as this no doubt is functioning just fine.
It is bad enough that people—mostly poor people are forced to endure sub-human conditions for so many years. It’s worse when the authorities attempt to placate and pull wool over their eyes with excuses, Nancy stories and just plain baloney. This surely constitutes abuse. It must stop.
