Derek Achong

Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Min­is­ter Chan­dresh Shar­ma says $100 mil­lion will be spent in the next two months to help solve T&T's flood­ing prob­lems. Shar­ma made the state­ment yes­ter­day at a press con­fer­ence to an­nounce his min­istry's pro­gramme to clean and im­prove drainage across the coun­try to re­duce flood­ing, at the min­istry's of­fice at Kent House, Mar­aval. "A lot of the wa­ter­ways are clogged by old mat­tress­es, plas­tic bot­tles and de­bris...As re­sult, wa­ter can­not get in­to the rivers and out to sea," he said. "The project is very am­bi­tious and over the next eight weeks, we will at­tempt to clean every one of these that are blocked."

He said glob­al trends showed that Trinidad would be af­fect­ed by flood­ing and heavy rain­fall lat­er this year and that the glob­al stan­dard for the im­prove­ment of drainage is for it to be done every five years.

He an­nounced that silt and oth­er block­ages would be re­moved from trib­u­tary rivers and wa­ter­ways un­der the purview of his min­is­ter, while the Min­istry of Works and Trans­port would main­tain the ma­jor rivers across the coun­try.

Shar­ma says the pro­gramme, which be­gins on Tues­day, is a col­lab­o­ra­tion among his min­istry, the Works and Trans­port and Food Pro­duc­tion, Land and Ma­rine Af­fairs min­istries. He said more than 30,000 em­ploy­ees of state com­pa­nies would be work­ing on the project, in­clud­ing em­ploy­ees of the Com­mu­ni­ty-Based En­vi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion and En­hance­ment Pro­gramme (CEPEP), Un­em­ploy­ment Re­lief Pro­gramme (URP) and all re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tions.