The re­cent tor­ren­tial show­ers have high­light­ed the coun­try's lack of pre­pared­ness for the im­pend­ing rainy sea­son, as ev­i­denced by the flood­ing ex­pe­ri­enced over the week­end and the col­lapse of a wall on­to a home in East­ern Quar­ry, Laven­tille, on Mon­day.

Al­though cur­rent ef­forts to ad­dress the im­me­di­ate is­sues are es­sen­tial, it is ev­i­dent that a last­ing so­lu­tion is need­ed.

With a new gov­ern­ment in pow­er and a re­newed man­date, this may be an op­por­tune mo­ment to re­con­sid­er the lengthy and, so far, un­suc­cess­ful jour­ney to­wards es­tab­lish­ing a ro­bust and ef­fec­tive na­tion­al build­ing code.

This re­quires thor­ough dis­cus­sions among all per­ti­nent agen­cies, but does not need to be­gin anew, as we have ac­cu­mu­lat­ed a wealth of doc­u­ments and plans over decades that have al­ready con­tributed to the di­a­logue.

How­ev­er, while an over­ar­ch­ing pol­i­cy is im­por­tant, we can­not ig­nore the ex­ist­ing laws re­lat­ed to pub­lic safe­ty as­so­ci­at­ed with build­ing stan­dards and en­vi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tions.

T&T has been ex­plor­ing a com­pre­hen­sive build­ing code since 1967, ac­cord­ing to a re­port by the Min­istry of Plan­ning and De­vel­op­ment pub­lished in 2018.

Yet, in its ab­sence, there re­main more than 25 laws in place to en­force ex­ist­ing stan­dards.

Un­der the Con­sti­tu­tion, the State is the land­lord of over 50 per cent of the land in T&T and is there­fore re­spon­si­ble for es­tab­lish­ing and up­hold­ing the best stan­dards.

His­tor­i­cal­ly though, de­ci­sions made by the State, par­tic­u­lar­ly for res­i­den­tial plan­ning, have con­flict­ed with best prac­tices for com­mu­ni­ty de­vel­op­ment and land use, as dif­fer­ent gov­ern­ments im­posed dif­fer­ent poli­cies for land util­i­sa­tion.

Parts of Aranguez, for ex­am­ple, had been planned for agri­cul­tur­al pur­pos­es, but over the years, there has been a shift to­wards ap­prov­ing res­i­den­tial and com­mer­cial de­vel­op­ments. Con­se­quent­ly, the re­gion is now vul­ner­a­ble to flood­ing, with farm­ers bear­ing the ad­verse ef­fects.

When it comes to pri­vate de­vel­op­ments, the en­force­ment of prop­er stan­dards is gov­erned by the Mu­nic­i­pal Cor­po­ra­tions Act and the Town and Plan­ning acts. These reg­u­la­tions cov­er build­ing mod­i­fi­ca­tions, new con­struc­tion stan­dards, cer­ti­fi­ca­tion re­quire­ments, the au­thor­i­ty of en­gi­neers to cease con­struc­tion, the cor­rect meth­ods for de­mo­li­tion, and the can­cel­la­tion of plans if work is not ini­ti­at­ed with­in a two-year time­frame.

They al­so set the penal­ties for breach­es of reg­u­la­tions re­gard­ing new build­ings, in­clud­ing those built over drainage sys­tems, and give the State the pow­er to de­mand mod­i­fi­ca­tions to, or de­mol­ish, any struc­ture to en­sure pub­lic safe­ty.

How­ev­er, en­force­ment has of­ten been in­flu­enced by po­lit­i­cal fac­tors, par­tic­u­lar­ly since many of­fend­ers are from low-in­come back­grounds.

A 2017 re­port from the Land Set­tle­ment Agency re­vealed that the in­for­mal set­tle­ment pop­u­la­tion was around 250,000.

While the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of en­vi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion, pub­lic health is­sues, and phys­i­cal haz­ards were ev­i­dent with such a large num­ber of of­fend­ers, the re­port found that en­force­ment was be­ing ob­struct­ed be­cause of the po­lit­i­cal risks, es­pe­cial­ly since these set­tle­ments are large­ly oc­cu­pied by the un­der­priv­i­leged.

These are press­ing mat­ters that de­mand con­struc­tive di­a­logue and tan­gi­ble so­lu­tions to en­sure that com­pas­sion for the home­less does not com­pro­mise in­di­vid­ual and col­lec­tive safe­ty.

This past week­end proved that it is vi­tal that these con­ver­sa­tions take place with­out de­lay.

De­vel­op­ing a ro­bust code should be a key fo­cus for the Gov­ern­ment, but in the in­ter­im, we can sig­nif­i­cant­ly ben­e­fit from more en­force­ment of the ex­ist­ing laws in­tend­ed to pro­tect the na­tion as a whole.