Dear Editor,
When the announcement was made that there was going to be a $500 million expenditure on cleaning up Georgetown including its drainage, I said nothing and waited to see if the money would be spent properly, but somehow I knew that it was probably going to be a waste of time and the people’s money. I felt that the knowledge which was needed and the management skills necessary to return the system to normalcy were not there. On November 20 we had our answer.
When I saw people using hydraulic excavators, especially short boom excavators, to dig the drainage trenches starting from the middle or back end of them, I knew that we were in trouble. Drainage trenches should be dug from the front near the sluice towards the back away from the sluice not the other way around. If you do so the water will be ‘tracked’ out and the excavators will be digging in shallower water as the system begins to function from the excavator to the sluice. Moving towards the back away from the sluice exposes the areas where it is necessary to dig as the water level drops. Digging as they did, however, starting in the middle of the drainage trench or from the back end means that they were always excavating in deep water and thus their efforts were establishing no gradient to make them more efficient. In addition, because the water level was so high, those supervising had no concept of the slope that was being created by the operation. One also assumes that there cannot possibly be a renovation of any gravity drainage system if the work does not start in the outfall of the channel, ie, that part which goes from the koker to the river or ocean.
Ideally a drainage trench should begin at a slope which starts from a depth equal to the floor of the koker at the front and gently ‘sloped’ towards the back. Since the trenches would be dug from the front as the excavator goes further from the koker towards the back, the water in the front of the excavator would, given the fact that it was now cleaned of all encumbrances – garbage, weeds, etc – function properly, and at every tide the level of water in it would decrease exposing where has to be dug/graded next. Also when the excavators are digging, given our past experience, they would have to leave a slope of around 45 degrees from the top of the parapet to the bottom of the trench, and not the deep slopes I saw them digging some nearly 70-90 degrees. Some years ago in a video I did on the Number One canal, I showed where the road was falling into the canal since the slope was too deep and the soil in trying to naturally achieve this 45 degree angle, was taking the road into it. One could see huge cracks in the middle of the road where the slippage was happening , through a process which the engineers describe as rotational slippage. As a result I did see some months after I did that video the authorities started using draglines instead of the excavators. In addition to the fact that we have probably wasted $500 million, the damage to our roads that has been done will become apparent in time.
Also this was an exercise which was essentially to clean the waterways of all weeds and encumbrances, etc, and establish a gradient from front to back, I saw no excavators which had cleaning buckets which were designed to take out weeds and debris; the excavators which I saw, without exception, were using digging buckets which are designed to dig virgin lands. These digging buckets were particularly inappropriate for this task, and all they were doing was deepening and not cleaning the drains. The cleaning bucket is a shallower bucket and considerably wider, perhaps 6 ft. wide, such as the one I have attached here; they have holes in them which allow the water to run out the back of the bucket. In this way weeds, plastic bottles, etc, would be collected in the process, not left behind for an army of manual cleaners as I saw happening, since the digging buckets they were using are singularly inappropriate for taking out weeds, because as the boom comes out the weeds run out of the bucket with the water. They could have been employed more productively elsewhere, which is not to say that cleaning buckets cannot also dig when the necessity arises, since they are digging soft mud from the bottom of a trench and not virgin hard land as were the buckets I saw them using.
I estimate, as the first manager (then assistant field manager) who could operate an excavator – the Hymac 580 C at Versailles in 1970, since my father was a director of Bookers and a close friend of Eric Vieira who was then head of the Agricultural Machinery branch of Guyana Stores and we got one of the first hydraulic excavators ever brought to Guyana to help evaluate it – that with this digging bucket every hour the machines I saw working in Georgetown were doing perhaps 30% of what they could have achieved if they were using the right bucket. We have people in this country, like the managing Director of Genequip, Renger van Dijk, whose knowledge of these matters is at least good if not profound and who could recommend the right bucket for the job. I am sure that there are others, but I know Mr van Dijk personally, so I can offer him as a good example.
Also what I saw during the exercise was that too many people have covered their drains outside their properties without making proper provision to clean them periodically, so whilst the army of people we saw cleaning drains had passed, I could see no discernible difference in the water level after they completed digging compared to before, especially given the extremely dry period we were experiencing at the time (August, September, October 2014).
Editor, we have to place blame where it is due and the public and the City Engineer’s Department will have to take some of the blame. In the US and maybe even in little Trinidad if you want to change the way your bridge is built in front of your house you have to get a permit from the city to ensure that what you are doing meets the codes of the city, especially since outside your fence is the city’s property not yours, so no one should be allowed to build anything on the city’s property unless it meets the present requirements or standards of the city. This is clearly a situation which has gotten completely out of control, with people building not bridges but wide culverts covering almost the entire length of their property frontage on the city’s property, which are ultimately encumbrances to drainage. When they flood they complain the loudest, notwithstanding the fact that they are the ones causing the problem, ditto in the case of those who throw trash and other materials into the main drainage canals.
Since we are on this subject of the City Engineer’s department not doing their jobs, given that these drains are on the city’s property, guess whose responsibility it is to clean them? It’s because they have now delegated this responsibility, with the disastrous results we are seeing, to the citizens who are totally ill equipped to do it, so that all of these drains are dysfunctional if not non-functional. A special source of alarm is that they are allowed to build anything covering the drains which makes cleaning difficult or impossible.
Now we come full circle to the government, the city council’s Engineer, like the Town Clerk according to our Mayor, is more likely to take his orders from the Ministry of Local Government than the city council, so this problem now comes back to central government. Since it is a matter of record that the city has been asking to raise the ridiculously low property taxes currently applicable, and the government continues to say no to increased property taxes, the fact the government is the largest debtor to the council for rates and taxes is also compelling.
We have courts and we don’t use them, and we don’t demand that they work, by taking matters, which if we don’t get satisfaction in the local courts, to the CCJ; it always comes home to roost. Currently there is the important case which involves Ashni Singh spending our money – more than $4 billion – without the permission of parliament which must to go to the CCJ for resolution. We cannot chart a course in unknown waters without going through the difficult process of doing it. We cannot be lazy and disinterested when it is our job to do it.
Yours faithfully,
Tony Vieira
