Akash Sama­roo

Se­nior Re­porter/Pro­duc­er

akash.sama­roo@cnc3.co.tt

As the Wet Sea­son com­mences, some busi­ness cham­bers say they are will­ing to give the new Gov­ern­ment a grace pe­ri­od on the is­sue of flood­ing. How­ev­er, they have some sug­ges­tions in hand to mit­i­gate the im­pact of flood­ing, which they are will­ing to share with the new ad­min­is­tra­tion.

The Pe­nal/Debe Cham­ber of Com­merce told Guardian Me­dia that re­gret­tably, flood­ing has be­come a way of life in the com­mu­ni­ty.

Pres­i­dent Moti­lal Ram­s­ingh ex­plained, “The lo­ca­tion does not help be­cause 60 per cent of Pe­nal/Debe is un­der sea lev­el, so that is the biggest chal­lenge. When we face heavy floods, we usu­al­ly get a dou­ble wham­my be­cause a lot of rain falls and then the tide is high. So, peo­ple here, they get flood­ed out, they try to take pre­cau­tions and then you just try to get back to your life.”

Ram­s­ingh is, how­ev­er, call­ing for the stricter en­force­ment of laws re­lat­ing to build­ing codes, as he claimed peo­ple are de­vel­op­ing the land with­out prop­er drainage.

“What con­tributes to it is the fill­ing of the land. It’s a low-ly­ing area so when you fill it up, the wa­ter gets dis­placed and it has to go some­where else, and that is ba­si­cal­ly the prob­lem here. You can­not get away from it. Over the years the la­goons col­lect­ed the wa­ter, peo­ple start­ed to fill it and de­vel­op and that dis­placed the wa­ter.”

Ram­s­ingh is al­so sug­gest­ing wa­ter con­tain­ment ar­eas to be built on state lands.

“The south­ern range, we need to have some sort of con­tain­ment area. And we are say­ing that there is a lot of state land where large ponds can be de­vel­oped there that could as­sist in stor­ing that wa­ter and re­leas­ing it on a slow­er ba­sis.”

Mean­while, the Ch­agua­nas Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce (CCIC) will be seek­ing a meet­ing with the rel­e­vant min­istries in ear­ly June to dis­cuss its con­cerns with flood­ing.

CCIC pres­i­dent Bal­dath Ma­haraj ex­plained, “Apart from En­deav­our, we have close to the Ch­agua­nas Po­lice Sta­tion, you tend to have a lot of flash flood­ing. In Der­rick Road and Or­ange Field, in that area there is a back­up of the riv­er. We did not see too much rain over the week­end, but the rain has start­ed.”

Ma­haraj said he will al­so be rais­ing is­sues with the Hon­da Riv­er.

“That riv­er comes from Ca­paro and it flows un­der the Solomon Ho­choy High­way, the last gov­ern­ment did clear it a year ago, but we are start­ing to see a build-up again and we did not see much clear­ing dur­ing the dry sea­son.”

And while flash flood­ing is a ma­jor is­sue in the cap­i­tal, Down­town Own­ers and Mer­chants As­so­ci­a­tion (DO­MA) pres­i­dent Gre­go­ry Aboud be­lieves oth­er parts of the coun­try may de­serve more at­ten­tion at this time.

Aboud told Guardian Me­dia, “We do have that prob­lem of pro­tect­ing the city and the tens of thou­sands of peo­ple who live around Port-of-Spain from the over­flow of the East Dry Riv­er and the Mar­aval Riv­er when too much de­bris comes down the riv­er and gets stuck un­der the var­i­ous bridges. That is a prob­lem that needs at­ten­tion, but I would want to ad­mit that there are oth­er ar­eas of the coun­try, low-ly­ing ar­eas of the coun­try, that suf­fer far worse than Port-of-Spain, and we don’t want to call for too much at­ten­tion just yet un­til we feel that oth­er ar­eas which are more bad­ly af­fect­ed will be ad­dressed.”

Aboud said it would be un­re­al­is­tic to ex­pect the new ad­min­is­tra­tion to have any im­pact on flood­ing just yet.

“But we do feel that from the point of view of in­fra­struc­ture, and from the point of view of qual­i­ty of life for the cit­i­zens, that this is a mas­sive is­sue that has not re­ceived the at­ten­tion that it de­serves,” he said.

The DO­MA pres­i­dent lament­ed that the pre­vi­ous ad­min­is­tra­tion was “im­per­vi­ous” to the as­so­ci­a­tion’s opin­ions and ad­vice on the mat­ter.

“We are hop­ing now that there will be more re­cep­tion to the ideas that come from the per­sons who ex­pe­ri­ence all of these dif­fi­cul­ties, that their ideas will be tak­en on board a lit­tle bit more read­i­ly than in the past.”