Residents of South Ruimveldt in Georgetown may soon see an end to their flooding woes with the current rehabilitation works to the tune of some $27.8 million on the main drainage sluice in the area.
The Ministry of Agriculture in a release yesterday stated that this disclosure was made by Minister Zulfikar Mustapha during his presentation as part of the 2021 National Budget debate.
Mustapha informed that the National Drainage and Irrigation Authority (NDIA) is currently executing rehabilitation works on the main drainage sluice in South Ruimveldt, which are expected to be completed before the end of April this year. He explained that since maintenance works to the sluice had not been done in a number of years, it had contributed to most of the flooding issues faced in the community whenever there is rainfall.
“South Ruimveldt is one of the areas in Georgetown that floods quickly when the rain falls. Last November … we had some amount of flash flooding in Region Four and the residents in that area were affected. This cannot continue to be the norm. What we’re doing, through the NDIA, is rehabilitating the main drainage sluice there to improve the drainage capacity of the area. These works are expected to be finished by the end of next month. We’ve also included maintenance to this structure in our overall drainage improvement programme, which includes scheduled maintenance to a number of other structures that fall under the control of the NDIA,” the minister was quoted as saying.
Once completed, residents of South Ruimveldt and other neighbouring communities will see improvements in the drainage capabilities of their communities.
According to the minister, in the past, programmes had been implemented to assist with flooding in the area but without provision for maintenance works.
“The efforts made in the past five years to bring flooding in this and several other vulnerable areas on the Coast under control, were not properly conceptualized. If you are going to execute a programme to clean drains and canals in the area, which was attempted but never completed by the City Council and then Ministry of Public Infrastructure back in 2017, you have to have a long term plan in place. There needs to be some amount of scheduled maintenance work for the drains and critical drainage structures to compliment the initial cleaning,” Minister Mustapha contended.
