Once again flood­ing has caused loss of life, dis­rup­tion to liv­ing and tens of mil­lions of dol­lars in loss­es and in­con­ve­nience to thou­sands of peo­ple; those di­rect­ly af­fect­ed by the flood­ing, mud and dam­age to prop­er­ty and those who have to com­mute to and fro in and out of floods and mud and spend long hours on the roads.

The floods of the last week­end in Diego Mar­tin, Glen­coe, Mar­aval and Pe­tit Val­ley were ob­vi­ous­ly not sim­ply an "act of God," deemed so by one min­is­ter. Rather they were pre­cip­i­tat­ed and made worse by a num­ber of man-made fac­tors that have been en­trenched as bad cul­tur­al prac­tices.

In­deed, such fac­tors as bad­ly-planned hill­side con­struc­tion, ne­glect­ing to clear and clean drains, rivers and oth­er wa­ter­cours­es, de­struc­tive en­vi­ron­men­tal prac­tices, slash-and-burn agri­cul­ture and the dis­place­ment of trees and oth­er forms of cov­er have been go­ing on for sev­er­al decades. Mean­while the au­thor­i­ties, lo­cal and cen­tral, do noth­ing about es­tab­lish­ing prop­er codes and de­mar­cat­ing ar­eas where there can be no hous­ing de­vel­op­ments, which can con­tribute sig­nif­i­cant­ly to ero­sion and even­tu­al­ly flood­ing.

What is al­so of note is that the me­te­o­rol­o­gists have not linked the heavy rains to any dis­as­trous storms and hur­ri­canes, but rather typ­i­cal rainy-sea­son weath­er, when down­pours are the norm. In such cir­cum­stances it is al­ways wor­ry­ing to con­tem­plate what might hap­pen if the coun­try were vis­it­ed by one of the sev­er­al storms and hur­ri­canes which pass through the Caribbean as a mat­ter of course be­tween Ju­ly and No­vem­ber.

The ma­jor­i­ty of re­ports com­ing out of the ar­eas af­fect­ed in­di­cate that the gov­ern­ment min­istries and de­part­ments have done a fair job of as­sist­ing with the cleanup op­er­a­tions af­ter the fact and giv­ing as­sis­tance to res­i­dents who have been dis­placed. It is ex­pect­ed that not every­one or every group of af­fect­ed res­i­dents would be com­plete­ly hap­py with the ef­fort, but nonethe­less the min­istries and gov­ern­ment agen­cies are at work.

But most im­por­tant now is not the loud at­tempts to per­suade that the min­istries and agen­cies have been and are as­sist­ing res­i­dents, but rather the need for a stud­ied analy­sis by the said min­istries and spe­cial­ist agen­cies to de­ter­mine the caus­es of the flood­ing-and hence fig­ure out a so­lu­tion, or at least a means of less­en­ing the threat and con­se­quent dam­age and de­struc­tion.

It is cer­tain that sim­ple and many-stat­ed pre­ven­tive mea­sures, such as clear­ing wa­ter­cours­es sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly dur­ing the dry sea­son, must be at the core of the so­lu­tion to this peren­ni­al prob­lem, which af­fects many parts of Trinidad and To­ba­go. So too there must be se­ri­ous at­ten­tion to long-term plan­ning for con­struc­tion and oth­er forms of de­vel­op­ment. It can­not be that in the 21st cen­tu­ry of know-how and tech­nol­o­gy, con­scious­ness about the en­vi­ron­ment, the im­por­tance of pre­serv­ing hill­sides and wa­ter­sheds, hel­ter-skel­ter de­vel­op­ment or squat­ting is al­lowed to be the norm.

The ar­chi­tects, the con­ser­va­tion­ists, the en­gi­neers, the town and coun­try plan­ners and, most of all, those with the pow­er to en­force stan­dards and codes to en­sure bal­anced and se­cure de­vel­op­ment must sure­ly recog­nise that the hap­haz­ard, lack­adaisi­cal ap­proach can­not be al­lowed to con­tin­ue. To be cer­tain that some­thing hap­pens be­yond the im­me­di­ate, the Prime Min­is­ter and her Gov­ern­ment must im­ple­ment long-term ac­tion be­yond meet­ing im­me­di­ate needs.

If that is not done, then as sure as night fol­lows day, flood­ing and loss of life and prop­er­ty will fol­low heavy rain, for the rest of the 2012 rainy sea­son and long af­ter.