News in the wake of Mon­day’s flood­ing in parts of Cen­tral and South Trinidad took on grim fi­nal­i­ty yes­ter­day when the body drown­ing vic­tim An­tho­ny Walkes was fi­nal­ly found.

Walkes, of New Grant, was at­tempt­ing to cross a bridge in Hard­bar­gain to get to a rel­a­tive’s house when he was swept away by flood­wa­ters rag­ing through the com­mu­ni­ty. Mem­bers of the T&T De­fence Force and the Of­fice of Dis­as­ter Pre­pared­ness and Man­age­ment searched for over a day be­fore find­ing Walkes’ body yes­ter­day.

The loss of life is but one of the un­fore­seen per­ils which Trinidad and To­ba­go has been for­tu­nate enough to have avoid­ed for the most part dur­ing such oc­cur­rences in our his­to­ry and is a sce­nario cit­i­zens of­ten do not cater for.

Apart from Walkes’ un­for­tu­nate demise, for which this me­dia house of­fers con­do­lences to his fam­i­ly, sev­er­al com­mu­ni­ties were in­un­dat­ed by flood­wa­ters. Res­i­dents in the com­mu­ni­ties of Biche, Ch­agua­nas, Cou­va, Ma­yaro, Princes Town, Rio Claro, San Fer­nan­do, Tabaquite and Tal­paro suf­fered hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars in dam­age to res­i­den­tial and agri­cul­tur­al prop­er­ty. Many of them would have been af­fect­ed sim­i­lar­ly ear­li­er this year, adding to their fi­nan­cial woes at a time when COVID-19 is al­ready se­vere­ly af­fect­ing their abil­i­ty to earn in­come and de­plet­ing their sav­ings.

This me­dia house has elu­ci­dat­ed many times be­fore on this coun­try’s dis­as­ter pre­pared­ness pro­grammes and of the pub­lic be­hav­iour which con­tributes to some of the sce­nar­ios that put cer­tain parts of the coun­try in dan­ger.

In the build-up to Mon­day’s event, oth­er parts of the coun­try had ex­pe­ri­enced sim­i­lar del­uge. While it is al­most im­pos­si­ble to pre­dict where flood­ing will strike at all times, the ODPM and re­gion­al bod­ies should have been a lit­tle more proac­tive with out­reach dri­ves aimed at some of the very com­mu­ni­ties ahead of the cur­rent rainy sea­son and long be­fore Mon­day’s event.

In­stead, and as we are all too ac­cus­tomed to ex­pe­ri­enc­ing, per­son­nel from dis­as­ter man­age­ment units in the 14 re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tions were on­ly placed on high alert on Sun­day, when the bad weath­er had al­ready set in and nat­u­ral­ly did not reach cit­i­zens in flood-prone ar­eas with crit­i­cal items, like sand­bags, ahead of the tor­ren­tial rains and flood­ing.

Again, it is not on­ly the fail­ings of the bod­ies re­spon­si­ble for dis­as­ter mit­i­ga­tion that cre­ate the prob­lems. The is­sue of cit­i­zens dump­ing de­bris in­to wa­ter­ways is a peren­ni­al woe, while in re­cent weeks Min­is­ter of Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Kaz­im Ho­sein has not­ed con­struc­tion of pri­vate prop­er­ties along riv­er cours­es and di­ver­sion of such wa­ter­cours­es to ac­com­mo­date this ac­tiv­i­ty as an­oth­er ma­jor prob­lem now plagu­ing some ar­eas ex­pe­ri­enc­ing fre­quent flood­ing.

Min­is­ter Ho­sein, as the man with ul­ti­mate re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for the na­tion­al re­sources to tack­le the ma­jor prob­lems, must shoul­der some of the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty. But on the oth­er end, un­til John Pub­lic can re­sist the urge the do things that neg­a­tive­ly af­fect the en­vi­ron­ment, we may nev­er over­come the over­all prob­lem. Per­haps then, the death of Walkes may spark the change we ur­gent­ly need.