Poor plan­ning and sub­stan­dard in­fra­struc­tur­al works are be­ing blamed for the flood­ing that oc­curs at the Mara­cas Beach carpark every time there are tor­ren­tial show­ers along the North Coast.

Res­i­dents from vil­lages scat­tered along the north­ern penin­su­la, such as Las Cuevas, La Fil­lette, Rin­con, and Blan­chisseuse, com­plained of the de­lays they had to en­dure every time the main ac­cess road to Mara­cas Beach is flood­ed.

Sev­er­al hours of in­tense rain­fall yes­ter­day, cou­pled with the high tide, led to the riv­er over­flow­ing and flood­ing the pub­lic carpark and road­way with over three feet of wa­ter in some places.

The road was im­pass­able for sev­er­al hours, and stu­dents and res­i­dents mak­ing their way back home—or leav­ing the area—were forced to beg rides from Good Samar­i­tans be­fore dark­ness de­scend­ed.

One mo­torist, tak­ing his chances, was forced to climb through the pas­sen­ger win­dow on­to the pave­ment af­ter his car stalled in the flood­wa­ters—and was lat­er as­sist­ed by a fire­man to push the car out.

Ken­neth Ali, who lives along the North Coast Road, point­ed to the stalled traf­fic on ei­ther side of the road and said this was not an un­usu­al oc­cur­rence.

“This has hap­pened be­fore be­cause of the lack of in­fra­struc­ture that was done with­in the de­vel­op­ment of this Mara­cas zone here,” he said.

He claimed de­vel­op­men­tal works in the past had not been done prop­er­ly, and res­i­dents were placed at a dis­ad­van­tage.

“Some have to walk down the beach to en­able them to make the jour­ney home, and it is an in­con­ve­nience and dif­fi­cult,” he said.

Sug­gest­ing that the in­stal­la­tion of a pump could help al­le­vi­ate the flood­ing woes every time it rained heav­i­ly, Ali said, “If they put a pump sys­tem that would push that wa­ter out ... that would help great­ly in cas­es like this, so we wouldn’t have this hap­pen­ing.”

He said, “Should this hap­pen on a week­end when the tourism in­dus­try is here, how is this go­ing to ham­per every­body else?

“I al­ways say to peo­ple in the Gov­ern­ment, ‘This is our tourism des­ti­na­tion, the North Coast.’ And not enough is be­ing done right—or, as we say in the past, not enough has been done, right?”

He is op­ti­mistic that changes are around the cor­ner.

“I hope that we can look for­ward to a new change and for bet­ter­ment so that these things would not be al­lowed to hap­pen,” he said.

While a few of the beach­side ven­dors’ huts were flood­ed, the op­er­a­tors said they were ac­cus­tomed to the ris­ing wa­ters every time it rained heav­i­ly and had in­tro­duced mea­sures to help mit­i­gate the fall­out.