Hundreds of Diamond and Grove, East Bank Demerara residents were last night affected by flooding when the door of a sluice situated at the Grove Market Street collapsed.
When Stabroek News, arrived at the scene, scores of persons were present as the authorities assessed the damage. The water which had risen to several feet in some places eventually receded after the tide had turned.
Three maintenance workers were among the crowd awaiting safety planks to arrive to begin remedial works. One of the three men, Neville Assibad explained that planks would be driven into the back and front of the koker so as to keep residents secure from further flooding before the next scheduled high tide at 11pm last night. Following the arrival of the planks around 9pm, engineers got to work making the required measurements.
Bharrat Harrinarine, another maintenance worker said that the last time maintenance work was done on the sluice was a month ago. However, both Harrinarine and Assibad agreed that the koker door was defective adding that the koker attendants said that they had made reports to the relevant authorities but nothing was done.
The construction on the sluice was said to have begun in 2014 and ompleted in 2015. According to Harrinarine, the foundation of the koker was not done properly. “This whole underneath this koker did blow away and when they build it back, we tell them this door got to change but they just wash and tar and leave it like that. The structure underneath at first, the contractor, a man name McKenzie put sand and just paal it off. The salt water start rotten out the wood and the whole thing rotten out. Underneath this koker structure had twelve feet when we go down to check it. Then a new contractor come and they full up at the bottom with brick…. This was like three years ago,” Harrinarine disclosed.
A smaller sluice situated almost 10 feet away was draining water from the flooded areas. The men noted that prior to the construction of the current damaged sluice, the smaller koker was the only one in the area that was functioning. The damaged sluice which is bigger was constructed to take the pressure off of the smaller sluice as the Diamond Housing Scheme was becoming more populated.
Ramdial Lalji was one of the Grove residents affected. His fridge, mattresses and couches were all damaged by the water. “This happen about 5 [yesterday] afternoon. Me lay down in me hammock and all me hear somebody holler ‘the koker bruk’ and by the time he say so and I get up from the hammock, the place done flood”, Lalji recounted. Within a matter of minutes his house was under water.
A sluice attendant standing nearby said he opened the koker at 8:45am yesterday morning and closed it at 12pm. The man said nothing seemed wrong with the koker at the time of the opening and closing, adding that with the high tide and the force of the water, it caused the collapse of the door.
Parbatie Paul arrived at the koker with her neighbours; they live in Diamond. They were all barefooted. “It’s horrible. All our beds and fridge, chair-set, everything soak. Within five minutes the water was in the house. We couldn’t have saved anything. Water was like two feet in the house”, Paul said. Despite putting sand bags at the front and back doors of the downstairs of the house, floodwaters still overtopped the bags and entered her home.
Her surroundings, she said, remained flooded for almost an hour and a half before the water started to recede. Paul said she lives with her husband, children and six grandchildren and was unsure of where they would sleep last night. The residents reported that Prime Minister Mark Phillips visited the scene of the damaged koker, along with several other ministers, but no one came to assess how badly they were affected.
“I came home from work and just as I got out of the car and sat down in the kitchen here, my nephew came to the door and said, ‘Auntie the koker break away’. I said ‘boy look, move with your nonsense’. He said ‘Auntie, yes ah serious’. When I got up and I looked out there, the bridge is covered all over and this water is just flowing in like mad. The two cars under the house, we had to rush right away and get them out. By the time we come back trying put up whatever on the floor on the chairs them but as you can see chairs and everything, all wet. There was nothing else I could have done. All I could have done was let tears come out of my eyes,” lamented Celestine Butters, a Central Packaging Facility Manager at the Guyana Marketing Corporation.
A section of pipe was being used to drain the water from the kitchen. It could be heard trickling away loudly nearby. Yet as fast as it was draining, several hours after the flooding, Butters’ daughter was still standing in water in her house that was at knee height.
Butters noted that sometime around 2005, when many places in Guyana had suffered from the huge flood, they were affected as well. Around this time, persons began squatting on the dam at the koker which prevented the four-foot drain behind them from being cleaned properly. The clogged drain would easily run over whenever the tide was high or if it rained, but Butters said this is the worst she has experienced.
She pointed out the thick concrete wall around her house measuring some sixteen inches high which was also constructed to prevent flooding, yet even that could not have prevented water from getting into her house yesterday.
“I heard somebody said [last night] that the koker had a crack. That should have been looked after a long time ago. Three months ago they said this happened. Is till this afternoon, they talking about it”, Butters said. The woman estimates her losses at millions of dollars. The woman’s daughter noted that the waters rose so fast, that all she could have done was take off the main switch. She complained that she and other residents were not getting water in their homes. Meanwhile, only a third of a four-inch pipe across a trench that provides water to homes here was seen. It is believed to have burst when the floodwaters came in.
The neighbour who lives in the same yard as Butters said that his son was shocked by the electric current when he hurried to pull out some electric cables to prevent them getting wet.
Even as Stabroek News was leaving Diamond, furniture could be seen in the verandahs of upstairs apartments. Butters’ daughter explained that because many tenants rented the downstairs of the houses in the area, tenants and landlords living in the upper flats tried to get as much furniture and appliances as possible upstairs.
Also among the residents affected was Azam Mohamed Yakub, a poultry farmer who lives along the Diamond Public Road. The man who purchases chicken from Bounty to supply the supermarket lost five hundred of his chickens which he bought just recently. The chickens are estimated to have been worth $400,000. Yakub however was not at home at the time but had returned to the koker to look on as remedial works were being done to the sluice. Relatives of his were busy cleaning up their yard.
Although residents were in a fit of cleaning last night, they were not too busy to worry about the next high tide and whether the safety planks would be secure enough to prevent further flooding. For some of them, the biggest concern was finding somewhere for them and their families to spend the night.
