Ot­to Car­ring­ton

Hun­dreds of homes were un­der wa­ter and many were count­ing their loss­es in San­gre Grande yes­ter­day, as flood­wa­ters as high as four feet turned streets in­to rivers, with many com­par­ing this to the dev­as­tat­ing 2018 flood­ing that af­fect­ed thou­sands across the coun­try.

Res­i­dents told Guardian Me­dia they were awak­ened by wa­ter flow­ing in­to their homes fol­low­ing overnight rains in­to ear­ly yes­ter­day.

Many of them were al­so reel­ing from dam­age caused to their prop­er­ties and pos­ses­sions.

Mem­bers of the San­gre Grande Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion’s Dis­as­ter Unit, along with chair­man Anil Juter­am, start­ed ren­der­ing as­sis­tance to those in need at 12 am.

There were re­ports of flood­ing in the San­gre Grande town cen­tre, along the East­ern Main Road, Guaico, Ve­ga de Oropouche and oth­er ar­eas in the re­gion.

To­co/San­gre Grande MP Roger Munroe was out as­sess­ing dam­age and as­sist­ing the many af­fect­ed con­stituents.

“We would have re­ceived in­for­ma­tion af­ter the con­tin­u­ous rain­fall from some­where around 11 to 12 am, we came out to do some as­sess­ment and the wa­ter lev­els were not as high as it is present­ly,” Munroe told Guardian Me­dia at the time we caught up with him.

“It has re­ced­ed in some ar­eas, the Rail­way Road One, Two and Three, Guaico, Damarie Hill. The East­ern Main Road, ac­tu­al­ly this morn­ing in the vicin­i­ty of Blue Moun­tains, was ac­tu­al­ly im­pass­able.

“The Rail­way Road saw some wa­ter at some high lev­els for the first time I would have seen some­thing like that, we would have ex­pe­ri­enced un­usu­al rain­fall. How­ev­er, the high tide com­bined with the rain­fall would have caused us to see the high lev­els that we are ex­pe­ri­enc­ing.”

Munroe es­ti­mates that hun­dreds of res­i­dents would have been af­fect­ed but not­ed there were many ar­eas he had not been able to ac­cess up to that time.

“I un­der­stand that some ar­eas have waist-height wa­ter and some have just around chest-height wa­ter in­side hous­es in some res­i­den­tial ar­eas,” he said.

Small busi­ness own­er Michael Ben­i­to, who lost ap­pli­ances in the 2018 floods, said yes­ter­day’s flood­ing had de­stroyed five re­frig­er­a­tors in his small shop. He added that no one had come to his as­sis­tance and he had no one to turn to get help ei­ther.

In com­mu­ni­ties such as Pic­ton Road, the wa­ter cov­ered the road with as much as three feet of wa­ter in some in­stances.

Res­i­dent Mar­sha Al­fred, who was vis­i­bly up­set, told Guardian Me­dia the is­sue was caused by un­planned de­vel­op­ment close by and blamed the au­thor­i­ties for al­low­ing de­vel­op­ers to build on wa­ter catch­ment ar­eas.

She said she has been liv­ing in the area since she was eight years old and had nev­er ex­pe­ri­enced flood­ing like yes­ter­day.

Al­fred al­so has her moth­er who is in her 80s at her home and their fam­i­ly church was al­so flood­ed.

Juter­am said they de­liv­ered sand­bags to the many af­fect­ed ar­eas.

“We were an­tic­i­pat­ing to be flood­ed out to­day (yes­ter­day) based on the rain that fell last night, the thun­der, the light­ning and so on. So, we were pre­pared, al­though some of us didn’t re­al­ly sleep be­cause our phones were ring­ing off the hook as of this morn­ing at 12 o’clock. Rain fell tremen­dous­ly non-stop in the San­gre Grande area, the whole of San­gre Grande at this point in time is above wa­ter in some ar­eas,” Juter­am said.

He added, “There are some un­planned de­vel­op­ments and there are al­so some un­scrupu­lous land de­vel­op­ers. There are two dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories, we’re talk­ing about the un­scrupu­lous land de­vel­op­ers are the ones who want to di­vert ex­ist­ing wa­ter­cours­es or even make them in­to box drains. We ac­tu­al­ly have some ar­eas with ap­proved lots over nat­ur­al wa­ter cours­es and strange­ly enough, they get ap­proval from Town and Coun­try and the Min­istry of Works Drainage De­part­ment from Port-of-Spain and as a re­sult of that un­scrupu­lous ac­tiv­i­ty tak­ing place, all the wa­ter is back­ing up, es­pe­cial­ly if there’s a high tide in the area.”

Clean-up op­er­a­tions are ex­pect­ed to con­tin­ue to­day in the re­gion.