Be sober my muse, and with gravity tell
What sad havoc and ruin all Kingston befel;
How the sea swept away all the dam and its smouses,
Made canals of the streets, Noah’s arks of the houses,
How some bridges blew up, how some houses came down,
And together went wandering over the town.
No, this is not Kingston, March 2013; it is Kingston, February 1855. This time around no bridges were damaged and no houses came down, but the seawater certainly went wandering over the town – or parts of it, at any rate. There was no local bard on this occasion to divert us with a ditty about the dam and its smouses (whatever those are), simply Minister Robeson Benn serenading us with a familiar tune about the failures of the Mayor and City Council. Having said that, if it really is the case, as he claimed, that after the breach in the koker the Mayor “called a big meeting,” and that “nothing happened for hours” while the Ministry of Works engineers cooled their heels waiting for the council to supply the material to mend the koker door, then he certainly would have cause for complaint.
Of course the power game between the government and city council is of long standing, and will only find resolution when local government elections are held under a rather different legislative umbrella than what obtains at present. In the meantime, as was observed in our Thursday editorial, it is hardly a state secret that the council has no money, and is not in a position to discharge many of its functions as it should, even supposing it had the will, the organization and a sufficient number of competent personnel at its disposal.
Whether or not the municipality had the capacity to supply the materials required by the ministry at short notice, at least the City Engineer’s Department should have been undertaking regular monitoring of all the kokers in the capital. Is this being done on a consistent basis, one wonders, and if it is, what measures are taken when faults are found? If it is something the city does not have the financing to deal with, are reports made to the Ministries of Local Government and Works? And if they are, does either ministry show any inclination to assist?
At a press conference last week the City Engineer was reported as saying that a serious look at the sluice doors close to the sea needed to be done, and that wooden koker doors should be replaced with steel or aluminium ones. It seems like a sensible proposal, although it goes without saying that this is not an undertaking which could be funded by the municipality; it would all depend on whether the government was prepared to finance it – a possibility which appears somewhat remote this side of local government elections.
James Rodway, writing on the history of Georgetown, recorded how on the afternoon of 17th February, 1855, “the sea rose during spring tides to a height, and with a violence unknown for fifty years, and, in the course of a few hours swept away nearly the whole of the upper part of the embankment, and inundated the military land and the adjoining suburb of Kingston.” It was this catastrophe which persuaded the usually tight-fisted Court to release funds over a period of time for the more durable sea defences as far as Kitty with which we are now familiar.
In the fifty years before that flood, a portion of the lower East Coast including Kingston, had gradually been coming under attack from the sea. There used to be a sandy beach there which served for lovers’ trysts and on occasion for bored officers to settle affairs of honour, but it was swept away by the encroaching sea. So too were two plantations near Kitty, called Kierfield and Sandy Point. The original house which had been built for the governors, had had to be abandoned very early in the nineteenth century owing to the trespasses of the ocean, and although it was still standing in 1855 it was dismantled during the flood of that year in order to save its timbers which were still sound.
While the violent spring tide which caused the flood of 1855 may have occurred during one of the cycles of erosion which geographers and engineers tell us affect this coast, no one has hazarded any kind of explanation about the invasions from the Atlantic which have happened twice so far this year. The first was in January, when a section of the East Coast road had to be closed, and now two months later we have the smashing of the Cummings koker door, and an angry sea showing its disdain for the defences at Uitvlugt. Are these just freak occurrences, or are the storm systems around Trinidad and Tobago which caused our problems symptoms of climate change brought about by global warming?
No one living along coastal Guyana, as the overwhelming majority of Guyanese do, needs to be told that large portions of our littoral lie below high tide level. Whether or not we can expect more storm systems coinciding with spring tides which batter our seawall (and koker doors), we can, it seems, expect rising sea levels. Has the government made any attempt to commission a study on what the implications are for us of rising sea levels, and just how viable our existence here along the coast is in the longer term? If it is viable, just what do we have to do to protect ourselves?
If some such study by reputable experts in the field doing computer modelling has been commissioned, then the administration has been very quiet about it. The trouble with democratic governments always is that they tend to think short term – as far as the next election – because long-term projects are difficult to sell to an electorate. In this instance, however, Guyanese are fairly sophisticated about the fragility of coastal life; they have had a lot of direct experience of flooding, and would be prepared to take on board expenditure related to looking at our options. Certainly it is an area where the support of the opposition can be sought, which in turn should be prepared to vote the necessary expenditure.
While clearly all the regular things like maintenance, replacing koker doors, digging drains and keeping them clear of garbage, etc, should be done, these are the micro-operations which come under our control. The consequences of global warming, however, do not, and we need to have some idea of what the future holds, and how we might have to go about ensuring that our descendants, not to mention ourselves, can continue to live here too.
