While residents and farmers of the Mahaicony Creek are seeing a significant drop in water levels after two months of deep flooding, they are convinced that even tougher times are ahead when the land dries out.
The Save Abee Foundation yesterday conducted a medical outreach for Mahaicony Creek residents hard-hit by floods over the last few months. Around 300 residents showed up at the Mora Health Centre for attention. The residents have complained that they have received little help from the authorities since the flooding started.
Over the last two months, heavy rain in the Mahaicony watershed coursed down the river, flooding low- lying farms and exposing problems with the drainage infrastructure on the Region Five (Mahaica/Berbice) coast. Areas such as Trafalgar, Lovely Lass, Numbers 29, 30 and 31 villages were inundated, mostly because the main koker and channel at Trafalgar were blocked. Two key pumps at Trafalgar had also been vandalised a year earlier and this compounded the problem.
“It’s been a long time since this whole thing started and only about a week and a half ago it started moving down fast. It’s not gone completely because my garden still has a lot of water and I can’t do anything there and even when the water goes down completely tougher times will come because we still will have to wait for the land (to dry) to go again,” Lowlaysar Shrikant, a farmer from Gordon Table, told Stabroek News yesterday.
The man, who has a two-acre cash crop farm, explained that even when the water completely recedes, he will still have to wait at least a month for the land to be ready for use again.