Restore the city’s canals

Jun 01, 2015 Editorial

The rains came and within hours parts of the city were literally under water.
When things like this happen one must either believe in global warming because over the decades that people had been living in and around Georgetown they could not recall flooding to such an extent. The weather patterns must be changing so that more water comes from the skies.
There are those who point to the prolonged hot spells with temperatures reaching record levels and say that the place is hotter than it ever was. On the other hand there are those who talk about cyclical behaviour. These are the people who say that there were such temperatures in the past but actual recording of weather patterns back then was unheard of.
However, in Guyana, the most likely reason for the floods is poor engineering and even worse development planning. Our leaders inherited a city that was crisscrossed with drains and waterways. The capital had some large drains and canals that were deep to the point where people named them ‘Forty-foot’.
All of these canals led to either larger canals or to the Demerara River. Prolonged rainfall meant nothing to the city but some inconvenience. The water would be collected by the inter lot drains, which would flow into the canals and other waterways, which actually served as reservoirs when the tide was high. At the fall of the tide the kokers would open and the water would flow into the Demerara River.
On East Coast and West Coast Demerara these canals flowed into the Atlantic Ocean. In the past the government through the Village Councils ensured that these were always cleared. Flooding was almost unheard of.
Today, flooding is as common as taking a taxi to some location in the city. As soon as it rains there is this accumulation of water on the streets.
Homes are not immune and for the visitors to the country who queried the type of construction that saw the houses on stilts they can now understand. Houses built according to the North American standards are often flooded.
Because of the collapse of the City Council— and the view is that the previous government was encouraging the collapse by starving the municipality of funds—the small inter lot drains are no longer cleared to the extent that they have become useless. Even the small waterways are clogged. Development in the form of Styrofoam and plastic has not helped.
There is a view that the city fathers may wish to reconsider reintroducing the large canals that they had closed some years ago to cater for the growing population and traffic.
Where those canals once existed are now car parks and malls. In some cases roads have been built there. People must now decide whether they are prepared to live among fish or whether they will sacrifice some of the roads in the city. In any case, some of these roads are impassable because the City Council simply cannot repair and maintain them.
There is another aspect to this situation. Dr. Roger Luncheon, the former government’s chief spokesman had blamed the flood on the squatting along the reserves. Many people resorted to squatting along the canals and pretty soon there was no passage for the heavy equipment to clear these canals when they became desilted.
In recent memory, one still remembers the hostility on the part of some people who were squatting along a canal in La Penitence when the government tried to move them to clear the outfall channel.
People behaved as though that was their birthright. To this day the outfall was never properly cleaned. Those areas are relatively new housing areas when compared to Georgetown where the canals existed and to their credit they do have wide outfalls.
So the real problem is in the heart of the city. It is there that we need to restore the wide canals.

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