The Sea Wall - Our topmost critical infrastructure

The Sea Wall – Our topmost critical infrastructure

Mar 10, 2018 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,
Our dear land of Guyana is known as the Land of Many Waters. We enjoy the beautiful North Atlantic sea breeze on any hot sunny day. We carry on with our daily activities without ever thinking about critical infrastructure. Many of us who live on the East and West Banks complain about the closing of the Demerara Harbour Bridge – that is renowned for being one of the longest floating bridges in the world.
But the Sea Wall is by far the most critical infrastructure in our little nation state. We tend to look at the frequent overflow of water on the adjacent areas to the sea wall as just a phenomenon. However, this is by far the most advanced, persistent threat to our country. In the physical world, threats are pretty clear to identify. In the digital world, we assume risks and provide appropriate defence to mitigate them. Looking at our current disposition in context of our sea defence, we are by far the most vulnerable country to natural flood disaster in the region. We have experienced flooding before and saw the loss and damage that it caused. Have we identified our measures of performance and effectiveness after those instances?
From a national perspective, we need to look at the full spectrum of adverse effects that will occur if the sea wall was to one day break and floods inundate the entire coastal region and rise as far as the land permits. What would become of our country and people? What would become of the other critical infrastructure like the roads, electric grid, and even the wharf? How will we receive help if we were to be covered by water and there is no place for us to go and resettle? What is Plan B?
These are just a few questions that this letter to the public seeks to identify, our people are so susceptible to famine, starvation, illnesses and death. We are not just a weak nation state because of our nonstrategic development of our critical infrastructure, but because there is literally no plan in place to reduce suffering to our people if this happened.
While this might sound horrible, I could not find warmer words to describe our situation, we need to prepare! There is such a high potential level of risk to our sea defences that we do not only have to think about the natural threats, but the malicious and intentional ones. Looking at it in this context, we need to ensure that there is a well-defined risk management framework that will help us today and provide security for those of our future descendants.
A proper risk management framework to mitigating the risks of the destruction of the sea defence and the subsequent flooding should be a top priority of our government. With all the current successes that our leaders are experiencing, and the expectations of new sources of income to our treasury, they need to put an extraordinary emphasis on elaborating plans to provide security to our nation.
There is the need for a well-defined disaster recovery plan for the current state of our country in context of the distribution of the coastal population, businesses and investment. The ability to use common sense and those scientific approaches to tailoring the mitigation of flooding is just as important to making top level contractual decisions.
Our country recognised the occurrence of Global Warming many years ago. However, we fall short of recognising that as fast as this phenomenon occurs, the threat to our nation state increases. Measuring six feet below the sea level may need to be reevaluated just as the water rises. We already know what the threat is. We already know the risks. Therefore, there is the need for a very well-defined and mature risk management process that will provide an appropriate set of controls and provisions for the safety of our nation.
Dustin Fraser

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