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Friday, July 11, 2025

Littering a big problem, says ODPM boss

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20161007

Of­fice of Dis­as­ter Pre­pared­ness and Man­age­ment CEO Stephen Ram­roop yes­ter­day blamed the flood­ing that oc­curred in sev­er­al parts of T&T on cli­mate change, lit­ter­ing and poor in­fra­struc­ture.

In a brief in­ter­view with the T&T Guardian, Ram­roop said: "There is a lot of lit­ter on the road­side and in the city and it is col­lect­ing. The cli­mate change is caus­ing wa­ter to come up rapid­ly."

He said yes­ter­day's weath­er sys­tem was not re­lat­ed to Hur­ri­cane Matthew but a west­ern con­ver­gence caused in­tense rain­fall.

"This is rainy sea­son weath­er. In the years (past) we had land­slides all around this time and the weath­er is anx­ious to give us trou­ble around Oc­to­ber and No­vem­ber.

"The chem­istry al­lowed in­ten­sive rain­fall which caused the prob­lem," Ram­roop added.

He said there were re­ports of ve­hi­cles strand­ed and heavy winds.

"That is part of the prob­lem. We are see­ing this reg­u­lary. Over ten and 15 years ago we nev­er used to have these trou­bles," he said.

He said, how­ev­er, that there was a lot of lit­ter­ing along the road­ways that was adding to the prob­lem.

Point­ing to garbage thrown on the side of the road­way, Ram­roop said in­fra­struc­ture over the years in Port-of-Spain and en­vi­rons had al­so changed. He not­ed too that the ODPM's fund­ing had been cut and its al­lo­ca­tion was $20 mil­lion, which was ham­per­ing its abil­i­ty to op­er­ate ef­fec­tive­ly. He said en­gag­ing the pri­vate sec­tor could as­sist it with fund­ing. "We don't need big fund­ing to tell cit­i­zens to clean around their hous­es," he added.


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