KEVON FELMINE

Se­nior Re­porter

kevon.felmine@guardian.co.tt

Res­i­dents and busi­ness­es in Union Hall, San Fer­nan­do, are again call­ing for ur­gent drainage up­grades af­ter Mon­day’s floods left roads im­pass­able and prop­er­ties un­der wa­ter.

The Gol­con­da Con­nec­tor Road near the Cross Cross­ing In­ter­change has long been a flood-prone area, but busi­ness­man Sher­az Dabideen said this week’s flood­ing was the worst in years.

“Be­cause our area is the catch­ment for Dun­can Vil­lage, Es­per­ance, Philip­pine and Union Hall, and be­cause of the en­tire hous­ing de­vel­op­ment, there is no land to col­lect the wa­ter. We had ex­ces­sive flood­ing be­cause of the heavy rain in a short space of time,” Dabideen said.

He ex­plained that cul­verts and tun­nels were in­ad­e­quate and poor­ly main­tained.

“The tun­nels are too small to take the vol­ume of wa­ter, and the drains have not been cleaned or main­tained for years,” he said.

At the HDC’s Cy­press Hill com­mu­ni­ty, res­i­dents said clogged drains and over­grown re­ten­tion ponds wors­ened the sit­u­a­tion. Many were con­fined to their apart­ments un­til wa­ters re­ced­ed, while roads were left dam­aged and wa­ter­ways buried un­der silt.

San Fer­nan­do East MP Bri­an Man­ning crit­i­cised the Min­istry of Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment for fail­ing to re­spond.

“No one from the min­istry has reached out to San Fer­nan­do East. We had flood­ing in Union Hall, which falls un­der a UNC-con­trolled cor­po­ra­tion. They al­ready have garbage col­lec­tion prob­lems, so when the rain fell, the garbage clogged the drains and wors­ened the flood­ing,” Man­ning said.

He al­so cit­ed a lack of grass-cut­ting and drain clear­ing.

He said, “A lot of peo­ple have com­plained about poor vis­i­bil­i­ty be­cause of how high the grass has grown. With no runoff, flood­ing gets worse. CEPEP and URP were meant to sup­port lo­cal gov­ern­ment, but when lo­cal gov­ern­ment falls short, and these pro­grammes are ab­sent, we see flood­ing on a scale we have not ex­pe­ri­enced in years.”

He ar­gued that fi­nances were not the is­sue, not­ing cor­po­ra­tions had re­ceived sup­ple­men­tary al­lo­ca­tions in the mid-year bud­get. In­stead, he ac­cused the min­istry of “mis­man­age­ment and vic­tim­i­sa­tion.”

Calls to Min­is­ter of Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Kadi­jah Ameen went unan­swered. Pe­nal-Debe Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion chair­man Gow­tam Ma­haraj con­firmed re­ceiv­ing re­ports of the floods and said drain-clean­ing would be­gin soon. While new box cul­verts re­main un­der con­sid­er­a­tion, he said fund­ing was not yet avail­able but the project re­mained on the agen­da.