What is the Oropouche Lagoon?
Just exactly what is the extent of the Oropouche Lagoon? How far, how big? What is its significance? What does it do? These are the questions that Balliram Siew spent the last ten years of his life explaining to the nation, the peoples of T&T; and three governments and its bureaucrats. And did he succeed?
On Friday night, Siew, aged 74, died at his home at Gopie Trace in Penal. He was born in the Oropouche Wetland System, in the Penal Rock Road area. He spent 40 years, from Independence to the early 21st century, working at the Ministry of Works. He worked for all the Governments–under Williams, Chambers, Robinson, Panday, Manning.
Siew spent his life working in the Oropouche districts: Siparia, Penal, Debe, Barrackpore, Fyzabad, San Francique, from the hinterland at Erin, in the South, to the Phillipine Hills in the North, to the Gulf, Mosquito Creek. He spent his life treating with drainage, floods, roads, culverts; and the system of locks and channels built to control tidal flows in the Oropouche Wetland System.
If you wanted information on the Oropouche Wetland, you consulted Siew. He comprehended the hydrology of the system. Rainfall, river, tides, soil, vegetation, wildlife, the complexity of the system. It was not a small system. It was large.
One of Siew's favourite question to bureaucrats, from the Ministry of Works, Nidco, Trintoplan, the Environmental Impact Assessment writers, was: "How big is the Oropouche Lagoon?" He made them scratch their heads. None could answer.
Siew told the governments and their "experts" and bureaucrats what was the extent of the Oropouche Wetland System. "Everybody saying the Oropouche Lagoon stop right there. By Debe, Penal. When I ask them the question not a man could answer. The Oropouche Lagoon not small you know. All the way from Barrackpore, Valley Line, way in the back of Siparia, coming quite down to the Mosquito Creek. Nine rivers in all. And not a man know that!"
Dr Peter Harris–who led the Banwari site excavation, which unearth the oldest pre-Columbian site in the Caribbean, 7000 years, in the Oropouche Lagoon in 1969–produced a 19th century map which shows the full extent of the Oropouche Wetland System. It ran back 40 miles inland from the Gulf of Paria. It was a fully integrated ecological infrastructure; doing its duty; providing food and sanctuary to thousands of species. Since then major towns, and many roadways and villages, human infrastructure have been built upon it. A fully developed ecology altered to locate a food, settlement and commercial economy.
The catchment area of the Oropouche Wetland 105,000 acres large. That is, an area more than all the former Caroni 1975 lands, which stretched from St Augustine to Piarco in the North, to Rio Claro, Barrackpore and Penal in the South. It is large. Its very largeness creates its vulnerability. A large hydrological system, catchment, flowing into a narrow neck, the Godineau Swamp, 7,835 acres; the system is constricted, altered; but not asphyxiated.
Building highway embankment over its neck, from Debe to Mon Desir, nine miles long, across the direction of sheet flow of water over the land, will put it into permanent chokehold. Will destroy its food economy which relies on water's expansion, sheetflow, its regulation of soil temperature, over the land.
So Siew told the governments and bureaucrats about the characteristics, hydrological and anthropological (including the agrarian/farming), of the Oropouche Wetland. They consulted him. He told them. But he was telling them what they did not want to hear.
They wanted him to say that the Oropouche Wetland was a goner, done, finished, covered over; no more hydrology, wetland, food. They tried to wring his arms. They tried to cover over the findings of experts. He refused to tow the line, to change science and fact. The Environmental Management Authority refused to do a study of the district's hydrology; despite Siew, and an Institute of Marine 2006 Report which warned about the negative impacts of building a nine mile highway over it.
As Banwari civilisation sought food in the Oropouche so do the people today. Visit the markets at Siparia, Penal, the Namdevco market in Debe. Visit the numerous shops, groceries, roadside stalls in the Oropouche Wetland districts. Nearly all the vegetable produce, melon, pumpkin, bhagi, bigan, ochro, bodi, ground provisions, fig, plantains and diary are grown and produced in the Wetland.
It comprises vast expanses of pasture, arable land, forest, mangrove, ponds, swamps, rivers, on soil laid down with biomass over millions of years; and whose fertility, in some places, runs 15 feet deep. The Oropouche districts comprise the largest food basket on the island. This food relies on the Wetland's complex hydrology.
Siew was a master teacher. He journeyed throughout the land meeting with prime ministers, technocrats, permanent secretaries, ministers, councillors, spreading his message. Many, when they saw him, felt their pockets growing holes.
Siew was patient, clear, logical, scientific, persuasive. He fought with ideas. Surely, now that the project has collapsed, the Prime Minister will reflect and do the scientific thing.
The Oropouche Wetland is a complex hydrodynamic system which has supported life and food production for millions of years; a highway cutting through is a death shaft through the nation's future economy.
Wayne Kublalsingh