Sascha Wil­son

Heavy show­ers caused flash flood­ing in sev­er­al parts of South Trinidad yes­ter­day. Up to last evening, there were no re­ports of loss to prop­er­ty. This was the sec­ond time this week that mo­torists, com­muters and res­i­dents were in­con­ve­nienced due to floods across the road­ways and near their homes. There were re­ports of flood­ing in Pe­nal, Debe, La Ro­maine, Cipero Road near Ste Madeleine and Union Hall. Pe­nal Debe Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion chair­man Dr Al­lan Sam­my said an­nu­al flood­ing in cer­tain ar­eas has be­come the new nor­mal be­cause there is no com­pre­hen­sive plan to deal with flood­ing in the coun­try. He pre­dict­ed more flood­ing if the rain con­tin­ued in­to the night. De­ven­dra Roop­nar­ine, a res­i­dent of a town­house at the Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion de­vel­op­ment at Cy­press hills, union hall, called on the au­thor­i­ties to fix the drainage sys­tem in the area. He com­plained that the area would flood when­ev­er there is a heavy down­pour.

A resident of Union Hall in San Fernando looks at the flood outside his home yesterday.

RISHI RAGOONATH

Mean­while, The Trinidad and To­ba­go Me­te­o­ro­log­i­cal Ser­vice has is­sued a river­ine flood alert, yel­low lev­el, for South and Cen­tral Trinidad un­til three o’clock this af­ter­noon.

It said small­er rivers and trib­u­taries, es­pe­cial­ly in cen­tral and south­ern ar­eas of Trinidad, are like­ly to con­tin­ue ris­ing and pos­si­bly over­flow as a re­sult of re­cent rain­fall ac­tiv­i­ty.

Fur­ther rain­fall which was fore­cast for overnight (last night) was ex­pect­ed to ex­ac­er­bate the sit­u­a­tion.

The Met Of­fice al­so said it con­tin­ues to mon­i­tor the ma­jor riv­er cours­es, but their lev­els were be­low thresh­old val­ues.

It ad­vised res­i­dents in south and cen­tral Trinidad to mon­i­tor weath­er con­di­tions and riv­er lev­els be­fore ven­tur­ing out­side, and to al­so mon­i­tor up­dates from of­fi­cial sources and plan safe­ty mea­sures, in­clud­ing emer­gency sup­plies of food and wa­ter.

To­day’s fore­cast is for vari­ably cloudy skies with scat­tered show­ers and thun­der storms dur­ing the first half of the day, which could bring stree and flash flood­ing as well as gusty winds.