All it took was a land­slide to trig­ger the par­tial col­lapse of a Trinidad and To­ba­go Elec­tric­i­ty Com­mis­sion (T&TEC) tow­er and lines at Grant Trace, Rousil­lac, leav­ing thou­sands of cus­tomers in the dark for sev­er­al hours on Tues­day night.

Most of the fo­cus since then has been on the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty in the pow­er grid that was ex­posed, as the in­ci­dent caused a loss of pow­er from Trinidad Gen­er­a­tion Un­lim­it­ed (TGU), the largest pow­er gen­er­a­tion plant in Trinidad, and af­fect­ed 30 per cent of T&TEC’s cus­tomers.

But there is a big­ger pic­ture to be con­sid­ered—the in­creas­ing num­ber of in­ci­dents caused by land­slides, soil ero­sion and oth­er sim­i­lar in­ci­dents that have caused se­vere dam­age to homes and pub­lic in­fra­struc­ture.

In re­cent weeks, fiery protests have been staged in sev­er­al parts of south Trinidad over di­lap­i­dat­ed roads, cave-ins and ero­sion that are threat­en­ing to cut off some com­mu­ni­ties from the rest of the coun­try and are caus­ing many res­i­dents to live in fear of los­ing their homes. The Min­istry of Works and Trans­port (MOWT) is strug­gling to keep up with calls for ur­gent in­ter­ven­tions and re­me­di­al mea­sures to pre­vent ma­jor dis­as­ters.

In­ci­dents are be­com­ing more fre­quent but are not iso­lat­ed or new.

Last year, heavy rain­fall fol­low­ing the pas­sage of Trop­i­cal Storm Grace caused a to­tal of 15 land­slides across the coun­try. The fi­nal tal­ly from the Of­fice of Dis­as­ter Pre­pared­ness (ODPM) was ten land­slides in sev­er­al parts of north­west Trinidad, in­clud­ing Bel­mont, St Ann’s, Mor­vant, San Juan, Mal­ick, San­ta Cruz and Pe­tit Bourg.

A hill col­lapsed on­to a road­way in Buenos Ayres, south Trinidad, cut­ting off the road be­tween Erin and Point Fortin and in­ci­dents were re­port­ed in oth­er parts of the coun­try.

That in­ci­dent was weath­er re­lat­ed but there were oth­er in­ci­dents caused by oth­er fac­tors. Cli­mate change is be­lieved to have been the cause when eight homes were de­stroyed by a mas­sive land slip­page in Bam­boo Vil­lage, Ce­dros, in 2018.

Hu­man ac­tiv­i­ty in the form of quar­ry­ing is be­ing blamed for the de­struc­tion of sev­er­al homes in Belle View, Clax­ton Bay. That ac­tiv­i­ty is be­lieved to have caused land­slides which have af­fect­ed at least six homes since Sep­tem­ber last year.

Of par­tic­u­lar con­cern is the ex­tent of the de­struc­tion that has oc­curred al­though this coun­try, safe­ly lo­cat­ed out­side the hur­ri­cane belt, has been spared di­rect hits from ma­jor storms and oth­er nat­ur­al dis­as­ters.

How­ev­er, there is a per­fect storm that has tak­en di­rect aim at T&T, a com­bi­na­tion of weath­er con­di­tions, cli­mate change and decades of unau­tho­rised land de­vel­op­ments, in­flict­ing se­vere con­se­quences. The re­sponse to all these haz­ardous events can­not be the re­ac­tionary ap­proach that seems to have been adopt­ed by the MOWT in re­cent times.

While the au­thor­i­ties have long ac­knowl­edged the prob­lem of coastal ero­sion and there has been a pro­gramme in place to ad­dress that sit­u­a­tion for sev­er­al years, land ero­sion and slip­pages are no longer lim­it­ed to those parts of the coun­try.

There is now an ur­gent need to ex­pand the man­date of the MOWT’s Com­pre­hen­sive Na­tion­al Coastal Mon­i­tor­ing Pro­gramme (CNCMP) to cov­er all in­ci­dents of ero­sion and land­slides and pro­duce en­vi­ron­men­tal­ly and eco­nom­i­cal­ly sus­tain­able so­lu­tions.

This threat to homes, in­fra­struc­ture and lives can­not be treat­ed light­ly.