Agri­cul­ture Min­is­ter Clarence Ramb­harat has de­fend­ed Gov­ern­ment against UNC Sen­a­tor Kadi­jah Ameen’s crit­i­cisms it had failed on man­ag­ing the flood dev­as­ta­tion.

Ramb­harat said he worked with sol­diers on flood re­lief is­sues since last Fri­day, spent sev­en hours on a truck with Princes Town Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion work­ers as­sist­ing Ma­yaro res­i­dents and he’d per­son­al­ly fer­ried emer­gency med­ical cas­es to the Ma­yaro Health Cen­tre. He said he al­so as­sist­ed work­ers in putting a preg­nant woman on a liv­ing room chair on a trac­tor-trail­er to take her to hos­pi­tal.

“Every fin­ger that could be lift­ed has been lift­ed in the last few days and cit­i­zens re­spond­ed, some­times ex­ces­sive­ly.

“Yes­ter­day we had too much food. We can’t—for po­lit­i­cal mileage—di­min­ish the hu­man re­sponse that oc­curred. We chose to al­low our Low­er House col­leagues to han­dle things while we take the busi­ness of the Bud­get for­ward,” he ex­plained.

He said go­ing in­to flood wa­ters “in ca­noe” wasn’t for every­one, since he had col­leagues who he want­ed with him in floods and oth­ers who he didn’t want to send there.

He said Trade Min­is­ter Paula Gopee-Scoon had busi­ness con­tacts and mo­bilised items. He said he had an­oth­er Gov­ern­ment col­league “get on” to ANSA McAL for a mil­lion-dol­lar do­na­tion and yet an­oth­er got en­er­gy com­pa­nies’ pledges of as­sis­tance.

“This (sit­u­a­tion) isn’t for gallery, when you give a per­son some­thing, you don’t say this was brought by X. You do the peo­ple’s busi­ness and gallery down the road.

“To­day’s not the day for that. You don’t need a UNC flag to res­cue and help peo­ple. I won’t let any­one di­min­ish the work of the peo­ple of T&T,” he said, adding he had his boots and tools at the Sen­ate and would change and get back to work af­ter the de­bate, which was wrapped up yes­ter­day af­ter UNC sen­a­tors walked out the House.