Yvonne Webb

In the af­ter­math of se­vere flood­ing at Pe­nal Rock Road on Wednes­day, Coun­cil­lor Hy­acinth Ram­per­sads­ingh is call­ing on the Town and Coun­try Plan­ning Di­vi­sion to be more vig­i­lant. Ram­per­sads­ingh, coun­cil­lor for Quinam/Morne Di­a­blo, blamed pri­vate landown­ers for chang­ing and clog­ging the main wa­ter­cours­es with un­reg­u­lat­ed de­vel­op­ment. She said: "Far too of­ten, peo­ple who have large parcels of land have been cut­ting it in­to pieces and giv­ing it to their rel­a­tives and chil­dren to put up a house here and put up a house there. Every­body in one yard and none of those hous­es have ap­proval from Town and Coun­try. "Some of them, who have built near to riv­er banks, telling us to come and dredge the riv­er. Should we put a back­hoe there to clear the riv­er and their hous­es fall down, they would turn around and sue the re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tion. You see our dilem­ma?"

Ram­per­sads­ingh al­so de­scribed how one landown­er has di­vid­ed and sold his land and has told the new own­ers the re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tion was re­spon­si­ble for road de­vel­op­ment. While some ar­eas are flood-prone, Ram­per­sads­ingh said in many in­stances the cause was man-made and the af­fect­ed peo­ple were some­times the ones who caused the prob­lems in the first place. "And they are the ones who come de­mand­ing com­pen­sa­tion from Gov­ern­ment when their place floods and they suf­fer loss­es," she added. Ram­per­sads­ingh al­so at­trib­uted the flood­ing to the in­dis­crim­i­nate dump­ing of garbage in the wa­ter­cours­es. She said on Wednes­day it was painful to watch dis­card­ed cloth­ing, co­conut shells, bar­rels, old tele­vi­sion sets and oth­er ap­pli­ances float­ing in the flood­wa­ters. Sev­er­al roads along Pe­nal Rock Road, in Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar's Siparia con­stituen­cy, were flood­ed.

Over a dozen fam­i­lies were af­fect­ed, in­clud­ing that of Lar­ry Ar­joon, whose home was un­der three feet of wa­ter. Hu­bert Mo­han's elec­tri­cal shop suf­fered ma­jor loss­es. Yes­ter­day, af­fect­ed res­i­dents were joined by the Com­mu­ni­ty-based En­vi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion and En­hance­ment pro­gramme (CEPEP) and Un­em­ploy­ment Re­lief Pro­gramme (URP) work­ers to clean up their homes and the flood­ed area. Min­istry of Works em­ploy­ees were re­mov­ing de­bris from the wa­ter­cours­es, Ram­per­sads­ingh said. She said the Of­fice of Dis­as­ter Pre­pared­ness and Man­age­ment (ODPM) al­so was as­sess­ing dam­ages in an ef­fort to bring im­me­di­ate re­lief, through ham­pers and mat­tress­es, and the Health De­part­ment was sched­uled to spray the area. Ram­per­sads­ingh said sev­er­al box drains were sched­uled to be com­plet­ed with­in the next few weeks, along with the paving of sev­er­al roads, af­ter which the prob­lems would be al­le­vi­at­ed. "Every day we are work­ing to bring so­lu­tions to make life bet­ter in this com­mu­ni­ty," she added.