Rhon­da Krys­tal Ram­bal­ly

Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar has de­clared Diego Mar­tin a dis­as­ter area and pledged emer­gency re­lief fund­ing for re­cov­ery ef­forts to fam­i­lies who were af­fect­ed by yes­ter­day's heavy rain­fall. She has man­dat­ed Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Jack Warn­er and oth­er min­is­ters to bring their pro­pos­als to Cab­i­net so re­lief could be quick­ly brought to the area and fam­i­lies who suf­fered loss­es and dam­age to their homes.

One man from La Puer­ta and an­oth­er from Rich Plain died as a re­sult of the floods, caused by hours of non-stop rain­fall. Per­sad-Bisses­sar said two peo­ple were still miss­ing up to late yes­ter­day. She said: "I am ad­vised that two fa­tal­i­ties are con­firmed and two oth­ers are still pend­ing con­fir­ma­tion. "We give our con­do­lences to the fam­i­lies and our best wish­es to those who are re­port­ed miss­ing but not yet con­firmed."

She has asked Warn­er to pro­vide her with de­tails about the fam­i­lies and to meet with them, and said food sup­plies and shel­ters had been set up to as­sist vic­tims. She said the first re­sponse was to save lives, the sec­ond re­sponse was re­cov­ery and the third was re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion. The Prime Min­is­ter and sev­er­al mem­bers of her Cab­i­net briefly toured homes off the Diego Mar­tin High­way yes­ter­day. She hugged and greet­ed an el­der­ly woman and shook hands with res­i­dents who were busy clean­ing and wash­ing their sur­round­ings.

Al­so ac­com­pa­ny­ing the PM were Chief of De­fence Staff Ken­rick Ma­haraj, Chief Fire Of­fi­cer Carl Williams, act­ing Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Stephen Williams and oth­er of­fi­cials. Traf­fic had to be di­vert­ed at the Diego Mar­tin High­way from Ac­ton Court to Sier­ra Leone Road. Res­i­dents were al­so left with­out elec­tric­i­ty, wa­ter and tele­phones, as the TSTT Diego Mar­tin Ex­change was out of ser­vice af­ter lunch. Per­sad-Bisses­sar said there had been four inch­es of rain in two hours.

"I am al­so ad­vised that this has been the heav­i­est rain­fall in such an in­tense pe­ri­od for al­most 50 years. As we cel­e­brate our gold­en ju­bilee-50 years of in­de­pen­dence, I am ad­vised that the last time we had rain­fall of this na­ture was in 1962," she said. She said an im­me­di­ate first-ac­tion team was trig­gered and went in­to ac­tion ear­ly yes­ter­day morn­ing.

Per­sad-Bisses­sar said: "Tra­di­tion­al­ly, the south used to be flood­ed and I re­mem­ber many years ago, grow­ing up as a child, that my home was a ma­rooned home. "We are see­ing a dif­fer­ent pat­tern in the kind of flood­ing now, and there­fore that is why, one of the rea­sons I would say why I cre­at­ed a Min­istry of the En­vi­ron­ment and Wa­ter Re­sources. "We need to take every drop of wa­ter, from the time it comes down to the earth, to deal with it for run-off, drainage and of course, drink­ing and for agri­cul­tur­al pur­pos­es."