Great flood, 20 years after…
Residents along the East Coast Demerara who suffered massive losses from the 2005 flood that resulted from the overtopping of the East Demerara Water Conservancy still believe that it was an act of God and a reminder to the administration to get its act together in the face of climate change.
This was the view of several residents with whom Stabroek Weekend spoke during a recent visit to Mahaica, Enterprise, Buxton and Better Hope on the East Coast Demerara on the 20th anniversary of the flood.
Ismay Prince-Seenath, who sells coconut water on the Railway Embank-ment Road at Better Hope summed it up thus: “No matter if it was negligence, the overtopping of the conservancy or a breach, the record rainfalls were God’s work. The weather is now unpredictable. The last time God destroyed the world by water, and he said this around it will be by fire. I think it was a warning.”
Like all the others interviewed, she said she would not like to see another flood of any magnitude. “We survived by God’s grace. It could have been worse,” she said.
The mother of two, whose children were in their early teens at the time of the flood, like many others, woke up on the morning of 15th of January 2005 and stepped into more than a foot of water.
Because of the heavy rains and spring tides, she thought it was a breach in the sea defence.
“I wake up me husband and tell him, ‘Water’. The water was just below the bed. I hustle and I cook. After I finished cooking the water kept on rising,” she recalled.
The Seenaths moved what they could have lifted upstairs but everything could not fit, so they placed some things on top of a shed they had in their yard. A wardrobe that was too big to move was destroyed in the flood.
“When the water get big now, we had to move with boat to get food. People came in boats to share food. We had to come out of the water to get things. It was a tough time,” she said.
“I used to mind sheep. I had 25 and I lost about ten, mainly the older sheep that died from catching a cold. I cannot remember getting any financial assistance from anyone. We built back our stock when the sheep that didn’t die, dropped young ones.”
To protect the remaining sheep, Seenath’s late husband, who died three years ago, built a high pen and put them inside to keep them out of the water.
One day, she recalled, as she was clearing a space on higher ground for the sheep, her hands cramped, and she could not move them. Aware of the deadly disease, leptospirosis, she drank the recommended dosage of prophylactic antibiotics, and her hands later recovered.
Like most children along the East Coast Demerara her children could not go to school because schools were closed, and some were used as shelters for those who had nowhere else to go.
Even though the water was clear, Seenath said, she did not allow her children to venture into it.
After the water receded and the land dried, she said, “If you see greens that started to grow. Our yard was dirt. If you see tomatoes, cucumber that we didn’t plant. They started to grow and nobody planted them. The public road had more water than us. The boat used to come at the gap.”
Before the flood, Seenath had also sold coconut water.
Seenath, Eileen Beharry and Alan Persaud also of Better Hope saw the best of humanity during the floods.
Today, they are thankful to the many people and businesses, small, medium and large and individuals who pooled their resources and gave of their time to the Civil Defence Commission or directly to the people to alleviate their suffering.
Many people also cooked and distributed food from areas unaffected by the floods. Bhojnarine ‘Alex’ Williams of Dundee, Mahaicony was 17 years old when the flood inundated Georgetown, the entire East Coast Demerara and parts of East Bank Demerara.
He recalled residents obtaining donations of food stuff and other relief supplies in Mahaicony to give to residents in the affected areas.
Residents set up a public kitchen in Dundee to cook and parcel supplies for distribution. Williams eagerly joined the trucks that did the distribution.
“A group of us went around to collect the donations. We distributed cooked and uncooked food supplies. We drove through the East Coast on a truck. There were many people on the roadside. The leader of our group has since died. We were just ordinary citizens, but we had to do something to help. We came plenty times. We had different groups that used to come,” Williams related.
Seenath and Eileen Ramlogan were among the many who received boxed food and food hampers from various donors.
They, like many others, said that they built up their yards with dirt and concrete since the flood to mitigate against any more flood damage.
However, Alan Persaud, who was 35 years old at the time, said, “We took precautions but based on the 2005 experience we cannot build up the yards that high to keep the water out.”
He noted that based on watermarks, the water rose to between five feet and six feet in yards.
“At one time, the water was about a foot above the Line Top in Better Hope. The Main Road was flooded and the fishing guys from Mon Repos brought their boats from over the seawall and used them to take people back and forth to the Line Top (Railway Embankment Road). They picked up people from all the village streets and took them to the Line Top so they could go about their business. They charged a small fee. It was business for them,” he said.
Persaud recalled his brother Nalo and some other men sailing a cane punt out of the estate and docking it in his yard because the water was so high.
“Nalo used to take the punt with his wife and children, pretty much the women in the street and bring it out on the Line Top where they had a little recreation time. In the evening, he took it back in the estate. My two sons, Junior and Dominic, and Nalo’s daughters were in the punt and Stabroek News carried [a photo of] them. I still have the whole newspaper with them”
The same day the flood started, Persaud’s sons filled an air bed he had in his house, and they were playing in the yard on it when someone passing told them to be careful because the water was rising.
“It wasn’t raining that morning, but the water was rising. The water was crystal clear. We were the last house and after that is the cane fields. We didn’t know what the issue was,” he said.
Eileen Ramlogan, whose family ran a lumber yard, ‘Beharry’s’ and still does, remembers the flood, “like it was yesterday” and does not want a recurrence.
“We had a big horse that we used to transport logs at the time, and it died in the floods. The water was chest high. We had to build up our yard. Everybody built up their yards. The water was on the land for over three weeks. Luckily for us no one got sick. I cannot recall anyone helping us with actual recovery. We got donations of cooked food and foodstuff and sanitising stuff,” she said.
Ramlogan’s family were among many who built bridges from their verandahs or balconies to the road to escape walking in the water.
Enterprise
At Enterprise, which is about three quarters of a mile inland from the main road the situation was grim.
“Man, I don’t like to remember them times. People was like dogs in this place. Everybody was fuh themselves. Since then, I don’t mix and mingle. Twenty years later, it is same situation we deh in. Nobody does help anybody if you don’t help yourself. We had to fight our way out of the flood situation. We didn’t get any assistance to rebuild. We only got $25,000 for the more recent flood of 2019,” Jane (not her real name because she fears political victimisation) said.
“Everyone needed help and no one in authority come in to help us. Everybody needed help. During the flood, relief supplies were passing on the Line Top, but nothing was coming into the village. Those who could get out and collect things, helped themselves. Who could not get out to the Line Top suffered in their houses. I had a one-year-old child and my mother, who passed in 2014, to look after. I could not leave. It was every man for himself,” Jane said.
This writer went into Enterprise in a car top a few days after the flood began. It was only after Stabroek News reported on the grim situation in Enterprise that then Minister Leslie Ramsammy attempted to visit. He failed in his first attempt but made it the second time around.
“Nothing came in for the first couple of days. When the water started to recede, we started getting a lot of assistance,” Jane said.
“My sister and brother’s houses in Enterprise Gardens had ducked. Many people carried heavy losses. Another of my sisters who died in 2012 had to loosen some floorboards and replace them with mesh to rescue her chicken and ducks. Most people drove their livestock on the Line Top and watched them there. People had cows that drowned or died from cold.”
Buxton
Gerald Lawrence of Buxton said they used boats and discarded refrigerators to move around. “The flood was challenging, and it was compounded by the Taliban whose members were jail escapees. They ran things in the area from about 2002 to 2008. We had to get off the road by six o’clock. We had to answer a lot of questions from them like what we were doing on the road at nights. It was a double whammy for us, not anything I would like a repeat of,” Lawrence said.
“During the floods people left their animals on Brush Dam in the nights. It was the highest road apart from the Line Top. On the main road, some parts were like islands.”
Lawrence remembers waking up in his shop, stepping into water and getting electrical shocks. The first thing he did was to switch off his main circuit.
“I counted the rain falling nonstop for 33 days from December to January both day and night with brief periods of sunshine. I had to leave my shop, move out the mattress and go to my mother at Vigilance. I put drinks and the freezer on drinks boxes. When I went back if you see the damage that the flood and rats did. I lost nuff, buddy,” he recalled.
At the time a maintenance carpenter employed with the government, Lawrence said, he had to rebuild without assistance.
Now 59 years old, he recalled, “The flood brought all kinds of things around us, even skulls and skeletons were floating right here in Buxton. The tombs were open. It was scary.
“I saw freshwater fish in Buxton like I never saw before. There was haimara, pirai, yarrow and if you see the size of the yarrow. Then you knew it was from the conservancy. They have since disappeared. They could not survive in the environment.”
Like what happened in Better Hope and elsewhere, Lawrence said, “After the flood we had a lot of fruits trees springing up in our yards. No one planted them. In my yard, a gooseberry started to grow.”
To protect his skin and to ward off infections before going into the water which became stagnant at a certain time, Lawrence said, he rubbed coconut oil mixed with Jeyes fluid over his body.
It was a sad day, he said, when the newspaper’s woman’s daughter Nicola Alleyne, a young mother, died while picking coconut to make a meal. “She didn’t know where the bridge was from the trench, and she slipped off. She didn’t know how to swim,” he said.
Alleyne was one of four people who died by drowning in the flood.
