As if the year hadn’t already doled out enough man-made woes to visit on the Guyanese citizenry, the heavens decided to open up on Friday and add an element of pluvial misery to the mix. Prolonged and intense rain was reported right along the coast, but in terms of population centres, it was as usual in the nation’s unfortunately sited capital where the floodwaters caused disruption on the largest scale. Undaunted, residents nevertheless sloshed their way in boots or barefoot along the watercourses which passed for streets, in dogged pursuit of Christmas bargains. It was not that they had become inured to flooding; it is just that from long and bitter experience they knew there was no guarantee of either the water receding or the weather improving on the following day ‒ Christmas Eve.
In terms of flooding, this is the first real test either the new government or the new city council has had. While there have been showers – some of them quite heavy – in the previous rainy seasons, these have not been of sufficient duration to turn Georgetown into an equatorial Venice. On this occasion, the city received about 4 inches of rain between 2 am and 1 pm on Friday, according to City Engineer Colvern Venture, and the drainage system is only designed to handle 2.5 inches in a twenty-four hour period.
The problem was compounded by the fact that this occurred during a spring tide, when the length of time the sluices can be open is much reduced. According to a release from the Ministry of Public Infrastructure, under normal circumstances sluices can be kept open for up to six hours, but with the spring tide this is reduced to three.
The capital during its long period of neglect under the previous administration had been prone to frequent bouts of flooding, the most notorious being during the 2005 Great Flood, in which not just rainfall, but the East Coast Demerara Water Conservancy also played a role. However, the APNU+AFC government since coming into office made an issue of the fact that it was taking measures to alleviate floods, and ensure that the water drained off quickly. And this last is the key issue.
The city has undergone a major clean-up this year, and while it is still a lot more sanitary than it has been for years, there are nevertheless problems in localized areas. The previous government always cited as one of the reasons for the sustained flooding the habit of residents (and not just in Georgetown) of throwing garbage into the canals and trenches. But that still continues in some places; the SN photographer on Friday took a shot of the Ruimveldt sluice which was struggling to function against an accumulation of garbage, among which plastic bottles and Styrofoam containers were prominent. In Riverview too, garbage caused a major problem.
Since 2015, some desilting has been done, both of the canals, so their holding capacity is greater than it was, and on the outfalls of the sluices. In addition, in June last year a local task force was set up to address the question of flooding along the coast, involving a number of agencies. It was emphasized at the time that this would not be a solution to the problem, and what the task force has achieved has not been given much public exposure.
And now we have the current inundation and the usual consequences. These reflect in part, of course, perennial problems, more particularly the habit of citizens of concreting over their yards and sometimes the council’s parapets as well, in defiance of the by-laws. While they have regularly been requested not to do this, inevitably no one takes any notice of pleas where the sanctions are not routinely enforced. As it is, therefore, the area of ground which can absorb water has been drastically reduced, and the drainage system has to cater for taking off more water than ever before.
Gravity drainage, which in the past served the capital relatively well, since it is the most efficient form of drainage, can no longer cope, and has to be augmented by pumps. Significantly, two of these were not working on Friday. One of them, the Lamaha pump, Mr Venture told this newspaper, went down after a piece of wood became entangled in its impeller, while the Riverview pump had been down for a while. It had been clogged by garbage which had damaged parts of it. The first-mentioned pump was fixed on Friday, and they were hoping the other could go back into operation yesterday. The Ministry of Public Infrastructure deployed some additional pumps to alleviate the situation.
The state newspaper reported Minister David Patterson as saying that funds had been provided to the city council to have the Riverview pump fixed, but that it was only on Friday that he had been informed that this had not been done because “the issue was far bigger than that which was initially reported.” One can only wonder why the ministry was not informed of the extent of the problem so it could have been dealt with sooner, but yesterday the city authorities claimed it was because it needed a part which was difficult to obtain and which only arrived on Friday.
The Minister was also reported as saying that the Hydromet Office had not indicated that there would have been 75-100mm of rain on Friday, and in fact had predicted “partly cloudy to cloudy skies with scattered showers throughout Guyana.” The shortcomings of this particular department are hardly a state secret, and one can only observe that there are various international sources for obtaining data on our weather which are more reliable. Clearly the Ministry of Agriculture needs to take another look at the operations of this Office.
We have had a number of experts here looking at Georgetown’s drainage issues, the first following the 2005 flood. More recently, a Dutch Risk Reduction Team came here last year at government’s request, and, as we reported, said that the reactive approach to flooding had worked well under the circumstances, but the system was vulnerable and could collapse under extreme conditions. Its report which was submitted in January this year had identified short, medium and long-term measures which needed to be taken.
Dutch engineers who came to Guyana subsequent to that, were to work with the local agencies on one of the Risk Reduction Team’s recommendations. This was the modelling of the Liliendaal and South Ruimveldt drainage catchment areas, in order “to make the results of different levels of rainfall predictable,” as head of the National Drainage and Irrigation Authority Frederick Flatts put it in July this year. He went on to say that the Liliendaal catchment area is believed to be the most inefficient drainage system in Georgetown.
Project Georgetown Drainage, as it was called, was supposed to have got underway, although the population has had no feedback on whether the modelling has been completed, is still ongoing or has not even started as yet. What has to be recognized is that the city will not be able to confront flooding truly efficiently without the large-scale, integrated approach which the Risk Reduction Team proposed; there are simply no quickie solutions, although there will be temporary palliatives.
In the meantime, at the time of writing the water had drained off central Georgetown, but even without sustained rainfall, the streets, yards and some bottom flats of the southern wards of the city were still submerged. Hopefully, if the rain holds off the residents will not have a flooded Christmas, although it inevitably will be a damp one.
