Yvonne Ba­boolal

Em­bat­tled Port-of-Spain may­or Louis Lee Sing has thrown in the tow­el, ad­mit­ting that he "needs help from the cen­tral gov­ern­ment" to ad­dress the crit­i­cal flood­ing prob­lem in the cap­i­tal city. "I need help from cen­tral gov­ern­ment on this mat­ter...The Port-of-Spain City Cor­po­ra­tion does not have the hu­man or phys­i­cal re­sources to do the thing on our own," Lee Sing told the Guardian yes­ter­day. He made the com­ment af­ter Port-of-Spain was af­fect­ed by se­vere flood­ing Sat­ur­day night af­ter heavy rain­fall ear­li­er in the day.

The cor­po­ra­tion has al­ready be­gun work­ing close­ly with Min­is­ter of Works and Trans­port Jack Warn­er and his min­istry to treat with flood­ing in Port-of-Spain, the may­or said. Stress­ing that that he "had no choice," Lee Sing said: "We have been speak­ing with Warn­er for the past nine months. "We met with him and an en­tire team from his min­istry and ex­ter­nal con­sul­tants two weeks ago. "They (the con­sul­tants) of­fered, in my opin­ion, re­al so­lu­tions to the prob­lem. "I have been call­ing on all to stop talk­ing and be­gin the process of fix­ing the prob­lem.

"Warn­er has ex­pressed the same view...I am op­ti­mistic that we are go­ing to get on top of the flood­ing prob­lem in the city." The may­or said it was es­tab­lished that key drains in the city and key wa­ter­cours­es that take wa­ter out of the city were clogged. He said teams from the City Cor­po­ra­tion and the Works Min­istry, in­clud­ing the ex­ter­nal con­sul­tants, vis­it­ed the Wood­brook area to­geth­er on Sat­ur­day night which was cov­ered by flood­wa­ters. He said a wa­ter­course, a con­tin­u­a­tion of the Mar­aval Riv­er, tra­di­tion­al­ly took wa­ter out of the area and de­posit­ed it in the for­mer swamp­land area now oc­cu­pied by Movi­eTowne.

That could have been a con­trib­u­to­ry fac­tor in the flood­ing of the area, he said. Fur­ther, the park­ing of ve­hi­cles on King George V Park might have had some­thing to do with it too, he added. "The com­pact­ing of the earth in the park can cause the wa­ter to run off in­to the St Clair and Wood­brook ar­eas," Lee Sing said. He said the main chal­lenge was at the Princess Eliz­a­beth Home and on Ari­api­ta Av­enue. "I don't want to have to vis­it the Princess Eliz­a­beth Home again (for this rea­son)," the may­or said.

"The en­tire fa­cil­i­ty, in­clud­ing the sur­gi­cal the­atre, was un­der wa­ter...It means that dif­fer­ent­ly-abled chil­dren who need surgery may have to wait longer." Lee Sing said Good­will In­dus­tries, an­oth­er or­gan­i­sa­tion that as­sist­ed spe­cial chil­dren, as well as St Crispin's pri­ma­ry school, was un­der wa­ter too. He said he walked house-to-house in the area talk­ing to res­i­dents whose homes were flood­ed out and cor­po­ra­tion work­ers toiled all night to ad­dress the prob­lem.