Private Sector Commission (PSC) Chairman Ramesh Persaud yesterday lashed the authorities over the inundation of the city and called for a national inquiry of the extent to which governance is a cause of flooding.
Persaud also said that the confidence of the PSC has diminished in a number of costly projects that the government had embarked upon to tackle severe weather.
Persaud noted that with the flooding of the city and the coastal plain yesterday, business entities and poor households will once again suffer hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. Over the last year, the insurance industry has also warned of dire consequences if nothing is done about recurring floods.
Persaud said “While the quantum of rainfall may have been unusual for the time period it fell and natural causes will obviously be blamed as in the past…the PSC is concerned that once again it seems that the leaders of the nation have been caught off guard.
The alert mechanisms, forecasters and administrators both in central and local government have disappointed us in their proactivity and reaction to this development.”
The PSC Chairman lamented that the situation was occurring even after the millions had been spent by the government on the Doppler weather station, hundreds of millions being spent on drainage and irrigation annually, billions spent on the significantly delayed Hope Canal Project and the billion dollars currently being spent on the city and countrywide cleanup campaign.
“Our confidence in the effectiveness of these programmes has been further diminished”, Persaud declared.
The Hope Canal Project (HCP) on the East Coast to drain the threatening East Demerara Water Conservancy (EDWC) into the Atlantic Ocean was conceived of following the Great Flood of 2005. Nearly a decade later it is still to be finished. Numerous deadlines have been missed and there are concerns about cost overruns.
The HCP has four components: the Northern Relief channel which on completion will be 10.3km in length, from the sea defence embankment and extending to the EDWC, a high level outfall sluice, a conservancy head regulator and a public bridge.
AS to the Doppler radar, which was financed by the European Union and intended to give several hours warning of impending severe weather, Stabroek News has reportedly frequently on its inability to deliver.
The $550M installation has not delivered the types of weather information needed and there were no public warnings issued on Wednesday about approaching severe weather. By contrast, the Trinidadian Hydrometeoro-logical Department had issued severe weather warnings on Wednesday.
Persaud’s statement yesterday said that the PSC is calling on the Government, both central and local to provide urgently, the necessary assistance to ensure:
- That the areas affected are drained as soon as is practical. (The Private Sector will explore opportunities to assist).
- Support provided to aid clean up and recovery of households affected.
- Adequate systems are put in place to facilitate advisories being sent out to the public with regard to the expectations of the next few days.
- Assessment of damage for possible financial assistance to aid recovery of those affected and uninsured must be considered.
- Medical advisories are sent out so that additional disasters are not ignited.
The PSC says it is also of the view that the flooding is as a result of both a natural phenomenon and a governance problem.
“For the governance problem, a national inquiry must be done this time to ensure that the true causes for the various lapses in the systems can be identified so that our alert and reaction processes can be improved in the future”, the statement said.
