As roads col­lapsed and land­slides and se­vere flood­ing were re­port­ed main­ly in cen­tral and south Trinidad at the week­end, it was in­ter­est­ing to hear Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley of­fer­ing up a very clin­i­cal view of the root cause of the sit­u­a­tion.

Dr Row­ley, who has earned his doc­tor­ate in ge­ol­o­gy, not­ed that much of the soil in south­ern Trinidad was clay and that the more it be­came sat­u­rat­ed, the more like­ly it was to shift.

We have no rea­son to doubt his analy­sis.

In fact, we whole­heart­ed­ly agree with his pro­fes­sion­al as­sess­ment in this re­gard.

But while the Prime Min­is­ter may be right in iden­ti­fy­ing the source of the prob­lem, sure­ly, he knows it is one thing to be able to iden­ti­fy a prob­lem and quite an­oth­er to be able to fix it.

This brings us to the pri­ma­ry con­cern we have, not on­ly with his Gov­ern­ment, but those be­fore – their fail­ure to ad­e­quate­ly ad­dress the flood­ing men­ace that con­tin­ues to be­dev­il hun­dreds of cit­i­zens, and which has made life a liv­ing hell for them.

Even for those res­i­dents who have not been forced to ex­pe­ri­ence this night­mare, it is dif­fi­cult to fath­om that any­one could suf­fer such dis­place­ment in 2022 when we present­ly have at our dis­pos­al all the ex­pert knowl­edge and re­search re­quired, cou­pled with some in­ter­na­tion­al fund­ing op­tions, to make bet­ter poli­cies and de­ci­sions, even if in­cre­men­tal­ly, in the in­ter­est of pro­tect­ing the vul­ner­a­ble and for the greater good.

Yes, se­vere rain­fall is com­mon in trop­i­cal cli­mates, es­pe­cial­ly coun­tries such as ours which are sus­cep­ti­ble to the im­pact of cli­mate change.

But it is not enough for gov­ern­ments to sim­ply make lofty, ill-ad­vised and emp­ty promis­es from year to year, such as we were giv­en by a pre­vi­ous Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress gov­ern­ment that flood­ing was some­how “a thing of the past” or by cur­rent Min­is­ter of Works and Trans­port Ro­han Sinanan, who said in 2020 that floods would be erad­i­cat­ed in five years.

Far from this be­ing the case, we are faced to­day with a wors­en­ing cli­mate cri­sis that has re­sult­ed in a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of our coun­try un­der wa­ter and hun­dreds of cit­i­zens in a state of de­spair.

Iron­i­cal­ly, this week­end’s rains were pro­duced by a mere trough sys­tem. God for­bid we were faced with any ma­jor cat­a­stroph­ic event of the mag­ni­tude of those that have im­pact­ed some of our neigh­bours al­ready this hur­ri­cane sea­son.

The bot­tom line is that for heavy down­pours of rain, which are com­mon­place to us, we re­al­ly should not be as un­pre­pared as we seem to be.

But as a coun­try, we are seem­ing­ly more used to shar­ing blame in this re­gard than work­ing col­lec­tive­ly on so­lu­tions.

Two years ago, the PNM gov­ern­ment hired a con­sul­tant through the Cor­po­ra­cion An­d­i­na de Fo­men­to (CAF) De­vel­op­ment Bank to con­duct a com­pre­hen­sive drainage pro­gramme.

The con­sul­tant, Wit­teveen+Bos In­ter­na­tion­al Projects B.V. of the Nether­lands, was giv­en drainage plans that arose out of sev­er­al lo­cal stud­ies on flood­ing with an aim of de­vel­op­ing a com­pre­hen­sive op­er­a­tional plan.

We have heard lit­tle of that plan since then but now is as good time as any for an up­date on this im­por­tant pro­pos­al.

In fact, we dare say the soon­er it is im­ple­ment­ed the bet­ter for us all.