Shar­lene Ram­per­sad

With the Met Of­fice sig­nalling the start of the rainy sea­son and the trau­ma of last year's flash-flood­ing dev­as­ta­tion still raw, res­i­dents of Diego Mar­tin are be­ing as­sured that an ear­ly warn­ing sys­tem has been de­ployed to give them suf­fi­cient time to evac­u­ate.Chair­man of the Diego Mar­tin Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion Daryl Smith gave the as­sur­ance in an in­ter­view with the T&T Guardian on Fri­day.

"We have put in place flood ear­ly warn­ing sys­tems, in­stalled on high-tech poles in flood-prone ar­eas," said Smith."These poles have sen­sors that will emit a high-pitched alarm any­time wa­ter cov­ers the sen­sor. The cur­rent sen­sors are set to six inch­es above the ground."Smith said the sen­sors will alert res­i­dents any­time in the day or night and will al­so be pro­grammed to send text mes­sages to res­i­dents.

"Part of the alarm sys­tem is a text alert, which means no mat­ter where you are, you will get a text say­ing the area is about to flood and you should take all mea­sures to get home and se­cure your pets, or if you have el­der­ly rel­a­tives or chil­dren to get them out be­fore the wa­ter ris­es."He said the cor­po­ra­tion was in the process of gath­er­ing da­ta from res­i­dents to put in­to its alert data­base.

Smith said since com­ing in­to of­fice in 2013, flood pre­ven­tion has been the cor­po­ra­tion's top pri­or­i­ty."Since 2013, we em­barked on an 'all hands on deck' pro­gramme, where we bumped up the clean­ing crew from 70 to 200 peo­ple. We have al­so been work­ing with WASA to raise pipes out the rivers to stop de­bris from get­ting stuck and pil­ing up in the riv­er."He said that project was al­most 80 per cent com­plete.

The cor­po­ra­tion has al­so em­barked on a project to re­plant trees in ar­eas af­fect­ed by bush fires in the past years."In the past we had mas­sive bush fires and we have re­plant­ed over 2,000 trees in those ar­eas. We al­so en­sured there were fire trails to help the fire ser­vice in fight­ing fires. We had very few bush fires this sea­son."

The T&T Guardian al­so spoke to chair­man of the Ma­yaro/Rio Claro Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion, Haz­arie Ramdeen, who said the cor­po­ra­tion has been ag­gres­sive­ly clean­ing drains in the area in at­tempt to avoid a re­peat of last year's mas­sive flood in the area."We have been de-silt­ing drains, ag­gres­sive­ly clean­ing the area and all the wa­ter­cours­es," said Ramdeen.

"We gave con­tracts to a num­ber of small con­trac­tors to en­sure it was done on time."He said res­i­dents of Mafek­ing and Ma­yaro who had re­fused to be evac­u­at­ed from their homes last year are bet­ter pre­pared this year."I think they un­der­stand this year that when the wa­ter starts to rise in that way, that they need to get out. Be­cause even though we had floods be­fore, no one ex­pect­ed it to turn out so bad as it did last year."

How­ev­er, even though he said all shel­ters are pre­pared and ful­ly stocked in case of an emer­gency, he was still cau­tious about the wrath of Moth­er Na­ture."Noth­ing can stop the wrath of Moth­er Na­ture, what we had last year was a nat­ur­al dis­as­ter. We hope we will not see a re­peat, but if we get rain for five to six days straight, we have to be pre­pared for any­thing."

Chair­man of the Pe­nal Debe Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion, Prem­c­hand Sookoo, al­so said his cor­po­ra­tion was ready for the 2015 rainy sea­son."We cleared and cleaned all ma­jor wa­ter­cours­es and put all pre­ven­ta­tive mea­sures in place al­ready," said Sookoo."We looked at the ar­eas that were flood­ed in the past and tried to treat those first, we are well pre­pared in the event that we get floods."

Sookoo said the cor­po­ra­tion will al­so be tak­ing out full page ads in all the dai­ly news­pa­pers to sen­si­tise res­i­dents on the lo­ca­tion and avail­abil­i­ty of shel­ters.