THE CONSERVANCY

Jan 05, 2009 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

I get worried whenever I see the Ministry of Agriculture desperately trying to convince the nation that the accumulation on the land is mainly attributed to excessive rainfall. Just yesterday, the Ministry ran whole-page advertisements comparing the official rainfall levels of December 2005 with that which is said to have fallen in December 2008.
The point being made is of course that in the year of the Great Floods, there was less rainfall than what we are now experiencing and this could only mean that our drainage systems have improved, for had it not improved, we would have been in a far worse situation than in 2005.
The use of December 2005 figures is disingenuous. For one, every school child knows that the floods of 2005 took place in January of that year, in fact after only a few days of high intensity rainfall midway through that month, and not in December. It is therefore irrelevant to compare the December 2005 figures with those of today.
I know we have had a great deal of rainfall since the end of November 2008. However, I was stunned to note that we have had in excess of forty inches of rainfall for December 2008. I did not expect such high precipitation levels.
What is however patently clear is the fact that the problems of flooding that are now being experienced in Mahaica and Mahaicony are a direct result of the release of water from the East Demerara Water Conservancy. The release of water from the conservancy was necessary, we are told, to relieve the pressures on the dam. It therefore means that greater attention needs to be paid to managing the conservancy if we are to avoid the sort of losses that the present discharge is causing to farmers.
Billions of dollars are going to be lost because of the release of water from the East Demerara Water Conservancy.
In October of 2007, the World Bank approved funding for the Conservancy Adaptation Project. This project is a one billion dollar venture which, as with most projects which are funded by the World Bank for Guyana, has a component of US$2M, which would in effect lead to some engineering studies that will determine future interventions by funding agencies. In effect, therefore, what we have is our typically ill-designed project which is aimed mainly at determining how future funding for conservancy management should take place.
One of the reasons why we have such poor project conceptualizations is because they are mainly determined by external consultants.
It is clear to me that the East Demerara Water Conservancy is no longer able to hold the amount of water that it used to hold in the past. It may be a problem that it is not as deep as it was before or may not be draining as fast as it used to in the past. It is also clear that we need to deal with this issue of the conservancy, which is the greatest threat to flooding, before we deal with the many other drainage problems.
In the run-up to this rainy season, we were told that the conservancy level was deliberately kept low in anticipation of higher than usual rainfall. Well, it seems as if it was not kept low enough, because a few days of rain has resulted in water levels approaching the 60GD level and thus forcing the opening of the sluices into the Mahaicony and Mahaica Creeks.
Incidentally, these sluices were constructed so that when the water level in the conservancy was low, water could flow from the creeks into the conservancy. Today, the very opposite is happening: the levels of the conservancy are so high that water has to be released into the creeks.
It is clear also that apart from fixing the conservancy, we need to increase the volume rate of discharge from the land through our drainage systems. However, rising sea levels mean that the window that is normally open to do this is seriously shortened.
As such, there is need for either more drainage outlets, holding ponds and pumps. The government has told us that as an emergency measure to deal with the present crisis, it has sent for a $30M pump. Why one alone. And why such a small pump considering that the one that was procured for approximately $80M could not do the job at Hope?
The Minister of Agriculture should advise on the make, model and specifications of the pump that it has imported and just how many gallons of water it can pump per second. It should also indicate from whom it purchased the pump.

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