I wish to extend my support to CEO ODPM Dr Stephen Ramroop's call for an urgent national flood policy and wish to add landslides to the headline. It should therefore be a national flood and landslides policy. Also, I would like to strongly recommend the appointment of a multidisciplinary task force to conduct an assessment of the country's flood-prone and landslides-affected areas and to make short term as well as long term recommendations.
This team must look at new technologies and methods for addressing this problem and must be encouraged to think outside the box in finding solutions. This issue must not be kept on the back burner any longer because of rapid changes in the environment and the consequences of poor planning to address the impact of climate change.
A team of eminent engineers and consultants held discussions as far back as March 2012 with the former Minister of Works and Infrastructure, Jack Warner, and recommendations were made for the appointment of a multidisciplinary task force to address flooding and landslides. Subsequent to these recommendations, two people lost their lives due to flooding in August 2012. I fear many more will lose their lives if this matter is not addressed with a sense of urgency.
More recently, flooding occurred in several parts of the country upon the first rains in April and several areas were affected by landslides. The benching of areas affected by landslides in the Diego Martin area will not resolve the problem. Heavy equipment is hurriedly hired after flooding to clean and clear areas affected by floods and landslides and work is being executed to cut slopes on hillsides without any engineering drawings or engineering supervision.
Contractors are allowed to dredge rivers without any planning or guidance for the work. Several of our river bridges have been undermined by the operators of heavy equipment and this resulted in the collapse of a major bridge along the highway.
In areas along the Northern range where there are both planned and unplanned housing development, the soil is very unstable and when it becomes saturated there will be bigger landslides. There is a need to stabilise the soil and I note that many of the houses built on the hillside in the area were done without the perquisite approvals.
This, coupled with numerous septic tank and latrines, keep the soil saturated and when the rains fall it only compounds the situation. There is also inadequate or improper storm water drains to deal with the large volume of water hence the flooding and deluge.
In the Mameyes landslide disaster in Puerto Rico: "Saturated soils caused mudslides throughout Puerto Rico, although only one resulted in loss of life. In the hillside community of Mameyes, within Ponce, there was a block slide at around 3 am local time on October 7. A large slab of sandstone detached from a hill, moving about 250,000 cu yd (190,000 m3) of material down the hill.
The intense rainfall triggered the landslide, although pre-existing conditions such as a leaking water mains and poor sewage flow likely contributed to the event. The landslide destroyed about 90 houses, killing at least 130 people; however, the death toll could have been as high as 300. This made it the deadliest single landslide on record in North America. Many of the homes in Mameyes were poorly built with tin and wood materials, and some were built on stilts. Two landslides occurred near Pe�uelas, collectively damaging or destroying 13 buildings"
In light of this, I call on Minister of Local Government and Ministry of Works and Infrastructure Dr Surujrattan Rambachan to set up a multidisciplinary team to undertake a comprehensive study of flooding and landslides and make short and long term recommendations to deal with it in an effective and efficient manner.
Shyankaran Lalla
