Dear Editor,
When I write a letter I usually want to see what the comments are concerning it. So I monitor the SN site to see what the comments on my letter are.
I wrote a letter on November 20 describing what I saw as the shortcomings of the $500 million clean-up campaign the PPP did a few weeks ago, and the end result was that on November 20 the entire city of Georgetown was flooded out.
Usually every Friday evening, I invite a group of friends to discuss topical issues over a drink; this group which includes Carl Greenidge, Dr Rupert Roopnaraine, Earl John, etc, would discuss the issues of the day. On Friday 21st for the first time in 4 years I sat alone, since no one could come; they were all locked up in their houses unable to move because they were flooded in.
Poor Mr Greenidge lives in one of Guyana’s most exclusive areas, Bel Air Gardens, where the British and Canadian High Commissioners live as well as the manager of Scotiabank, and he told me he could not come out, since his yard, up to the evening of November 21 when we spoke, was knee high in water and his long boots were not equal to the task.
So home alone I opened the conversation on the phone, and I soon discovered that GT&T were probably affected by this flood since most conversations I had were riddled with poor quality reception and frequent disconnections, which was probably caused by water intrusion or high usage. This was explicable since everyone was locked up in their homes and they were all phoning each other. Finally, after nearly an hour I gave up since it was not possible to have a decent conversation with anyone due to the poor reception. In any event most of my friends were so annoyed at their flooded situation that I could not get them to concentrate on anything else; they were all completely focused on the poor drainage of the city and anger at the damage they had sustained, not to mention being virtual prisoners in their homes.
In the 21st century this is no way to live. After 22 years in office this is what the PPP have reduced us to, flood water in our streets preventing us from leaving our houses on a Friday night, and also high enough to disrupt our telephone system.
And what caused this? Did we have an earthquake? A tsunami? A hurricane? A volcano? No! In 2013 I did a month-by-month survey of all of the flooding on the coast and all of it was preventable because it was caused by neglect and poor maintenance, especially of the kokers.
On November 20 we got what was for us more than our traditional amount of rainfall in one day, with the PPP’s message still echoing in our ears that they were spending $500 million on cleaning up the city including the drainage system and that everything will be OK! The first proper rainfall storm of the December-January rainy season which started on November 20, virtually reduced Georgetown to a ghost town. Last year we heard the same thing a few days before the deluge we experienced when Minister Ramsammy told the nation that we were ready for the rainy season – we were not!
Now first of all, in this country we can and will in the future get more than 6 inches of rain in any one day and since our city’s drainage system is designed to remove 2.5 inches of rainfall in 24 hours, I don’t care who is in power we will flood if we get 6 inches in 24 hours.
Where I blame the authorities is that over the past few years it is clear that these massive storms are occurring with more and more frequency. It’s part of what I see as climate change along Guyana’s coastland. So it is time to make some major decisions.
In the past the people were protected from themselves since everyone was required to build their houses on pillars at least 6 ft off the ground. We have stopped doing this as a requirement of law, even though it has been a matter of public policy for many decades, and this oversight, be it by the city council, the other local government organisations or the government itself has left the population to pay for the consequences of this neglect.
But clearly we have to come back to the people like Carl Greenidge and others whose property is so flooded that they cannot even see where the road is.
If these massive storms will come with the frequency we see happening now, I believe that the time has come to take another look at what amount of rainfall we need to design our system for to remove the heavy rainfall that has been going on for the past few years. The government has done nothing to improve the drainage or to increase it to say 4 inches in 24 hours. I don’t see how this can be done by sluices and wider canals; that would be too expensive, but it can be done by operating the current system at peak capacity with gravity drainage using the existing kokers and supplementing them with large pumps strategically located, that will only be activated when there is a massive storm of over say 3-4 inches of rain. All outfall channels must begin to function immediately; someone must find a way. We have seen Boskalis desilting the Berbice River and now it is deeper than the Demerara River, so why can’t this government desilt the outfalls?
It is by far a smaller project than doing the Berbice. Can it be that Boskalis has better engineers and managers than we do?
Also the Abary River and the Mahaica River have to be dredged and desilted. The PPP are not doing their job to protect the population; they are letting these gravity systems die, and doing the lazy thing by installing pumps and passing the huge expense of doing so to the taxpayers and the people who lose heavily when these floods affect farmers, etc.
These pumps could be co-located with the kokers and both managed as one unit – koker, outfall and pump. Since this will only be activated when it rains heavily, I expect that electric pumps can be bought. Sooner rather than later when this government decides what they are going to do about our hydropower capability, we will be able to afford to use these pumps, but since we have lost so much holding capacity in the current drainage system through siltation, the covering of drains by the residents, covering by the government and/or the city, and neglect, we will be forced to use these pumps in heavy rainfall when waiting for the next low tide and the opening of the kokers.
I am not in favour of diesel pumps since oil will only get more expensive, but as soon as anyone other than the PPP gets into power in this country, I expect that they will do the sensible thing and approach Brazil to partner with us to build a hydropower facility for Guyana and for Manaus, Brazil at Tortuba.
Yours faithfully,
Tony Vieira
