People’s Progressive Party General Secretary Clement Rohee on Monday lauded the government’s $1B “Clean-up My Country” campaign, while stating that the massive flooding that resulted in the city and along the coast after torrential rainfall last week could have been worse without it.
“We wish to conclude that the impact could have been worse, had it not been for the ‘Clean-up My Country’ campaign, which, in our view, played a major role in draining parts of Guyana,” Rohee said at the party’s weekly press briefing.
He noted that “empirical evidence” suggests that the campaign did make a contribution to ease the flooding, which in some parts of Georgetown was well over two feet, but said tallying whether the contributions were high or modest would need to be determined by experts.
He also said more needed to be done to maximise the “significant investments” made by the government. “Clearly there is a need for better warning systems so that both citizens and the relevant authorities could properly prepare responses to such weather events,” he said. The government has made a significant investment to establish the Doppler radar system; however, there seems to be no maximisation of the kind of weather data and warning this could provide. “There is need to examine present drainage capacity to remove the large amount of water that accumulates from heavy downpours, such as what we experienced last Thursday,” he further said.
Rohee added that residents of Georgetown are partially to blame for the situation, while pointing out that residents have filled in drains and gutters to create parking or extend property. As a result, he criticised the management of the city for the lack of policing of the city building codes.
Last week the Private Sector Commission (PSC) lashed out at the government, calling for an inquiry to the extent to which governance is the cause of flooding. The Chairman of the PSC Ramesh Persaud, in a statement, said that 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 business community was concerned that once again 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,” he noted, while lamenting 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 clean-up campaign. “Our confidence in the effectiveness of these programmes has been further diminished,” Persaud declared.
The Hope Canal Project to drain the threatening East Demerara Water Conservancy (EDWC) into the Atlantic Ocean was conceived 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.
Stabroek News has reportedly frequently on the inability of the Doppler radar, which was financed by the European Union and intended to give several hours warning of impending severe weather, to deliver.
The $550M installation has not provided the types of weather information needed and there were no public warnings issued on Wednesday about approaching severe weather. By contrast, the Trinidadian Hydromete-orological Department had issued severe weather warnings on Wednesday.
Georgetown Mayor Hamilton Green, in a recent letter to Stabroek News, lamented that while the city is starved of resources, the government has also refused to implement proposals which would allow for the desilting of major canals. In addition, many residents have observed that while the enormous amounts of garbage consistently clog the drainage systems, the drains and canals themselves were in need of revetment and desilting to increase the capacity.
