With the pos­si­bil­i­ty of four storms af­fect­ing T&T in this year's hur­ri­cane sea­son, CEO of the Of­fice of Dis­as­ter Pre­pared­ness and Man­age­ment (ODPM) Dr Stephen Ram­roop says flood­ing is in­evitable.He said agen­cies un­der the ODPM were bet­ter pre­pared this year, de­spite Point Fortin may­or Clyde Paul say­ing lo­cal gov­ern­ment bod­ies were not equipped to re­spond to dis­as­ters.Scores of fam­i­lies in south and cen­tral Trinidad were left reel­ing by heavy winds and rains that up­root­ed trees and tore off roofs last Thurs­day.In an in­ter­view yes­ter­day, Ram­roop said the ODPM was map­ping those ar­eas where dis­as­ters had hap­pened and was ap­ply­ing an in­ter­na­tion­al­ly ac­cept­ed sys­tem to im­prove its ef­forts.

He added: "In my opin­ion, I think we are much bet­ter ready than we were last year as a coun­try. We re­al­ly co-or­di­nate the ac­tiv­i­ties of all the agen­cies that are sup­posed to be ready and in our opin­ion they have im­proved sig­nif­i­cant­ly since last year. "This is based on some of the drills we have had with them and some of the in­ci­dents we have had."We are ac­tu­al­ly map­ping those in­ci­dents and a num­ber of in­ter­na­tion­al­ly ac­cept­ed met­rics are be­ing used where we mesh the per­for­mances of the agen­cies in­volved in these im­pacts."We are sat­is­fied that there has been some im­prove­ment but as you can imag­ine, there is al­ways room for im­prove­ment."

Fol­low­ing an as­sess­ment of the freak storm in Point Fortin, Paul said lo­cal gov­ern­ment bod­ies lacked the train­ing and re­sources to re­spond to emer­gen­cies.But Ram­roop de­nied that, say­ing the re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tions were ready and were able to make an as­sess­ment of last week's in­ci­dents in four hours.He said: "They have to be and I think they are. As far as I am con­cerned, they are sup­posed to mo­bilise peo­ple. It's all about mo­bil­is­ing peo­ple and if the lo­cal gov­ern­ment au­thor­i­ties can't mo­bilise peo­ple who they deal with in the nor­mal run­ning of their busi­ness, then some­thing is wrong."We are quite hap­py that the dis­as­ter units came out and they did an as­sess­ment with­in three to four hours of the im­pact. In ma­jor coun­tries in the world, that is re­mark­able."

Re­spond­ing to crit­i­cism by some res­i­dents that the ODPM was tardy in vis­it­ing their homes, Ram­roop said: "If the pop­u­la­tion of T&T is ex­pect­ing peo­ple to reach on their doorsteps with­in 15 min­utes of an im­pact, then they are crazy. Not even in de­vel­oped coun­tries that is pos­si­ble."You have to de­clare a scene safe, then the first re­spon­ders have to come out. The Fire Ser­vices have to make sure that noth­ing is go­ing to kill any­body who is com­ing out be­cause the oth­er peo­ple, such as the dis­as­ter unit, can­not go in­to scenes that are evolv­ing. "You can't go in­to a flood and start as­sist­ing vic­tims. You will have to wait, oth­er­wise you your­self will be dead."

De­spite work be­ing done to al­le­vi­ate flood­ing woes, Ram­roop said cli­mate changes, cou­pled with land de­vel­op­ments, would al­ways have an ad­verse ef­fect on drainage.A key part of mit­i­gat­ing flood­ing in­cludes drainage main­te­nance, mon­i­tor­ing hill­side de­vel­op­ments, de­for­esta­tion and garbage dis­pos­als.Those re­spon­si­bil­i­ties lie with gov­ern­ment bod­ies, but ac­cord­ing to Ram­roop, cit­i­zens have to play a big part in flood mit­i­ga­tion.He said: "It's re­al­ly a com­bi­na­tion of a lot of fac­tors. Re­mem­ber that the globe is ex­pe­ri­enc­ing cli­mate change, so al­though you might have a dry rainy sea­son, there will be pe­ri­ods of heavy rain."If those pe­ri­ods of heavy rain have in­tense rain­fall in one area, which is dif­fer­ent be­cause of the cli­mat­ic con­di­tions, then I will say a large por­tion of that wa­ter is due to the cli­mate con­di­tions."It will hap­pen and as I said, it is be­cause of the lo­cal phe­nom­e­na which is in­cor­po­rat­ed in­to the whole El Ni­no, La Ni­na ef­fect. It is go­ing to hap­pen in all coun­tries of the Caribbean."

Ram­roop added that lo­cal gov­ern­ment bod­ies, such as Town and Coun­try Plan­ning, need­ed to en­sure that home­own­ers and de­vel­op­ers got ap­proval be­fore build­ing or ren­o­vat­ing.He not­ed: "If you have a ti­tle to your prop­er­ty, that is your land and there­fore if you have garbage, your drains are be­ing clogged and wa­ter is not able to ex­it... then you back up the drain and you will have dengue fever and oth­er things."Then it is not the Gov­ern­ment but it is the peo­ple them­selves who are caus­ing floods."There­fore, there is a long-term prob­lem in term of whether we are ready? When we talk about readi­ness, readi­ness re­al­ly starts in the homes with the house­hold­ers and how they take care of their own en­vi­ron­ment."There are a lot of new de­vel­op­ment in that the Gov­ern­ment of Trinidad and To­ba­go, even from the last ten years, have start­ed," Ram­roop said.