Half-hearted efforts will not work to ease flooding

Jun 08, 2015 Letters

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Dear Editor,
The 2015 rainy season commenced and the heavy downpours have caused severe flooding along coastal Guyana including the Garden City, Georgetown. Unfortunately the drainage system and the newly elected APNU/AFC Govt. were ill prepared to handle the flooding, which has caused extensive damages and the situation is unlikely to improve significantly any time soon because of the poor condition of much of the drainage infrastructures and the lack of adequate resources both human and financial to fix the system.
I will confine my observations herein to Georgetown where the M&CC management has been lax, resulting in poor administration of the Municipality for many years now. Old Georgetown was extended to greater Georgetown by annexing such areas as Bel Air Park and Prashad Nagar, which became urbanized from pastures and farmlands without proper planning consideration for such infrastructures as drainage, street lighting and waste disposal.
As a result, the sluices and drainage channels in the old City are unable to accommodate the large volumes of flood water generated from the enlarged City and this has resulted in back-ups and overtopping at several locations thereby causing flooding of many low lying areas in the City.
To make a bad situation worse, the drainage channels in the Old City as well as those in the newly incorporated areas are badly silted, overgrown with weeds and their culverts’ entries across roadways are clogged with floating debris while many of the sluices have been allowed to fall into disrepair and their outfalls choked with sling mud and floating vessels of all kinds which have restricted the free flow of flood waters to the river. Six undersized pumps were installed at selected sluice locations to assist with the discharge of flood waters when the sluices are closed at high tide. Unfortunately at the start of the rainy season two of them were down for want of repairs.
The existing gravity drainage system of the City is unable to handle the flood waters generated by heavy rainfall because land is not available/or too costly to acquire to enlarge existing drainage channels to facilitate larger flows to the sluices and greater storage. Hence the need for larger pumps to be installed at strategic locations to effectively get rid of excess water which floods the City particularly during those periods when the tide is up and the sluices’ doors are closed.
Drainage is an integrated system. Outfall – Sluice – Inland drainage channels. All three of these components have to be in optimum condition if they are to effectively drain the lowlands they serve. There is no ‘Band-Aid’ solution to the City’s drainage problems such as just clearing the outfall channels while the drainage channels leading to the sluices are silted and clogged with weeds or the sluices have broken/leaking doors. Half-hearted efforts will not work.
Many engineering studies were done but few of their recommendations have been carried out to improve the City’s drainage. Minister Patterson’s proposed intention to review these studies and update them in light of climate and environmental changes which have occurred over the past several years should be urgently pursued in order to get a clearer understanding of the drainage needs of the City since no one knows what volume of flood water the existing drainage system could safely handle during a 24 hour period.
He understands that Cabinet’s approval of $75M for selected drainage works is not a solution to the City’s drainage problems but just a stop-gap to provide some semblance of improvement as past administrations have been doing with a little work done here and a little there resulting in much of the same without seriously addressing the underlying problems. Hopefully, a new day is dawning and a drainage plan will be developed and executed quickly to halt flooding of the City at every cloud burst.
Finally, it was noted that during the outgoing PPP/C Govt., drainage and irrigation was under the responsibility of the National Drainage and Irrigation Authority (NDIA), a Division of the Ministry of Agriculture. Under the APNU/AFC Govt it appears that a multi-faceted organization has developed including the Ministry of Public Infrastructure, NDIA and M&CC with shared responsibility for drainage of coastal areas.
Experience has shown that shared management of anything including the drainage of coastal Guyana can only lead to confusion and discord and should not be allowed to develop for progress of the country. The APNU/AFC should review its allocation of Govt. responsibilities and have one Ministry/Agency answerable for drainage (and irrigation?) matters and this should be announced quickly to allow for drainage of coastal lands to be comprehensively planned and executed thereby preventing without much ado the widespread flooding now being experienced.
 Charles Sohan

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