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Wednesday, July 16, 2025

Brace for high winds, Saharan dust

by

Jean-Marc Rampersad & Sascha Wilson
22 days ago
20250624

It seems to be one Alert af­ter the next.

As the Ad­verse Weath­er Alert was dis­con­tin­ued yes­ter­day morn­ing, it was quick­ly fol­lowed by the is­suance of a Yel­low Lev­el High Wind Alert. The Alert is in ef­fect un­til 11 am Wednes­day, June 25.

The Trinidad and To­ba­go Me­te­o­ro­log­i­cal Ser­vice (TTMS) has warned of the high po­ten­tial for gusts ex­ceed­ing 55 km/h, es­pe­cial­ly in the vicin­i­ty of show­ers. The gusts may be brief but strong enough to dis­place un­se­cured roofs, and loose out­door items and can even top­ple trees or weak struc­tures. Sea con­di­tions are al­so ex­pect­ed to be­come ad­di­tion­al­ly ag­i­tat­ed and may dis­rupt ma­rine ac­tiv­i­ties.

The TTMS has ad­vised the pub­lic to se­cure loose out­door items and live­stock. Ma­rine in­ter­ests have been ad­vised to ex­er­cise cau­tion when con­duct­ing any ac­tiv­i­ties.

Sev­er­al weath­er im­pacts were ob­served yes­ter­day, with street flood­ing in sev­er­al ar­eas be­tween Cal­i­for­nia and Pi­paro.

Be­fore the High Wind Alert was in ef­fect, there were sev­er­al re­ports of wind dam­age. Sev­er­al sheets of gal­vanise were ripped from a Lal­too Trace home in Pe­nal, with fall­en trees near­by and along the Ca­paro Val­ley Bras­so Road. Gusts were record­ed in sev­er­al ar­eas – 59 km/h in Pi­ar­co at 4.24 pm and 55 km/h in Coalmine, San­gre Grade at 4.04 pm.

While the High Wind Alert re­mains in ef­fect un­til Wednes­day, rain­fall ac­tiv­i­ty is ex­pect­ed to de­crease as an in­flux of Sa­ha­ran Dust is ex­pect­ed to­day. The dust will per­sist through Thurs­day but grad­u­al­ly de­crease as the week pro­gress­es. Then, as Trop­i­cal Wave num­ber 10 ap­proach­es, the dust is ex­pect­ed to be re­duced to min­i­mal lev­els as scat­tered show­ers and iso­lat­ed thun­der­storms are ex­pect­ed on Fri­day. Ini­tial pro­jec­tions in­di­cate that most of the mois­ture and in­sta­bil­i­ty are lo­cat­ed af­ter the ax­is of this Trop­i­cal Wave, mean­ing that the chance of thun­der­storms fur­ther in­creas­es on Sat­ur­day, June 28.

Roof blown off

One Pe­nal res­i­dent was plead­ing for help af­ter strong winds blew the roof off her home.

Wa­hee­da Har­ry­lal said she was babysit­ting at a neigh­bour’s house just af­ter mid­day when she re­ceived the shock­ing call that sec­tions of her roof were gone.

When she re­turned home at Lal­too Trace, she no­ticed that gal­vanised sheets cov­er­ing the kitchen and bed­room ar­eas were miss­ing and her fur­ni­ture was wet.

"I will ap­pre­ci­ate any help that I can get. I am not ask­ing for much, I am just ask­ing for some­thing to be com­fort­able with. My bed is wet as well so I would not mind a mat­tress as well and some­thing to just get me by un­til fur­ther no­tice," she said.

Pe­nal Debe Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion chair­man Gow­tam Ma­haraj, who vis­it­ed Har­ry­lal, said sev­er­al roofs were dam­aged due to high winds over the last few days. 

"With the on­go­ing weath­er where we are hav­ing high winds and rain­fall, we are see­ing an in­crease in the num­ber of roofs that are blown off. This long week­end we have five such cir­cum­stances in Sun­rees Road in Pe­nal."

How­ev­er, he as­sured that the Dis­as­ter Man­age­ment Unit and the So­cial De­vel­op­ment Min­istry re­spond­ed quick­ly and would be as­sist­ing the af­fect­ed fam­i­lies.

   


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