How quickly we forget!

Apr 22, 2018 AFC Column, Features / Columnists

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A week ago on Monday, citizens of Georgetown woke up to a flooded City after a night of heavy rainfall. Commuters heading to work had a hard time of it, slogging through ankle- and calf-deep water. It was painfully slow going for drivers of cars, carts and motorcycles.
The heavy rains came at a time when the tides were so high, that the network of kokers and floodgates that ordinarily protect the City from inundation by the mighty Atlantic simply could not be opened. The water had nowhere to go, so it accumulated everywhere lower than 6 inches.
And so, every district in this section of the flood basin stretching from the Kingston seawall to Alexander Village/West Ruimveldt in the south and North Ruimveldt in the east, was flooded for several hours.
Caught off guard by the overnight deluge, citizens complained especially about the conditions they had move through to get to work and school. Some of the criticism, rather nasty and short-sighted, came from a particular section of our hyper-sensitive society.
Before addressing the citizens’ not unwarranted comments, let’s first point out that the City Council, under several mayors and town clerks, has failed the citizenry big time, and all we could do in the past was to bear witness to Georgetown’s slow descent into squalidness that got progressively worse from around 1998 to 2015.
But let’s take a step back just four years from today. Stabroek Market and its environs became infamous for its mountains of rotting, stinking, worm-infested garbage and filth, a haven for rats, flies and diseases. The same conditions existed on lower Brickdam and Hadfield St., all around the central fire station and the Stabroek Wharf, every heap standing like a sentinel, weeks and months at a time.
Along the length of Regent St. were ever-present piles of commercial waste on the pavements, in drains and along the parapets on both sides of the road from the Vendors’ Arcade to the Georgetown Zoo.
On Robb St. there was much of the same, but with rotten callaloo, fruits, pumpkin, pepper, ‘provisions’, cabbage and a virtual cornucopia of unsold vegetables, just thrown into the drains or piled up at the roadside for weeks/months at a time. Now consider the fact that before the PPP’s onslaught on the city, refuse in the commercial districts was cleared daily.
The city’s canals, trenches and drains were heavily silted, with Styrofoam and plastic floating and mixed in with wild grasses of all types. There were a pitiful few public facilities for garbage disposal, and it had become a culture almost for the general surroundings around eating houses to be littered with food and drink containers.
Unfortunately for the citizenry, neither the Jagdeo nor Ramotar regimes (1999 – 2015) cared about the city, and they never failed to make it plain. In fact, they didn’t even bother to conceal their reasons for this wanton disregard.
The Garden City, for more than 2 decades earned and kept its infamous acronym, the Garbage City.
Remember Guyana’s liberation from that callous regime in 2015. With it came some fresh air. The spirited clean-up campaign led by the new Public Infrastructure Ministry was supported wholeheartedly by a brigade of private and corporate citizens. It was a clear demonstration of our people’s desperation to retrieve the former face of the city. Citizens and the business community led a massive clean-up and repair project targeting the colonial era drainage system (90% of citizens had never seen it), parapets, roadways, the city’s markets, government buildings, culverts, trenches and every single piece of infrastructure. Nothing was left untouched.
Householders, owners and staff of large and small companies, dealers in heavy duty equipment and retailers of shoes and electronics, came out voluntarily in astounding numbers to sweep, clean, scrub, rake, desilt drains, re-surface roads and pathways, and generally clean up the smelly capital city that had lost its character under tons and tons of muck and waste.
One special sight to behold was the staff of Gizmos and Gadgets, clad in gloves and rubber boots, pushing wheelbarrows, spading up dirt and refuse, and weeding the avenue separating Waterloo St.
While Gizmos was doing their thing, the Infrastructure Ministry was cleaning the deeper drainage canals, sewers blocked for at least 20 years were cleared; they were repairing and building new kokers, and encouraging certain business owners who had used their connections with the crooked PPP regime to build illegal structures over sewage and drainage installations, to remove them and allow waste water to flow unimpeded towards the Demerara river.
Despite last Monday morning’s flood, one thing remains clear – the work done (and still in progress) by a clear-sighted President Granger and Cabinet continues to build this nation, but in truth, City Hall does not deserve many kudos for developing and carrying out a plan to sustain that massive 2015 citizens project.
There is good news though. M&CC is currently carrying out a large clean-up project in the southern city wards including La Penitence and Laing Avenue. The project includes the entire Le Repentir Cemetery stretching from Werk-en-rust to Mandela Avenue. The Ruimveldt wards at the eastern end of the city should also be included, and the people in these communities have an opportunity to earn some wages on the side if they agree to lend some muscle to the clean-up.
So is it safe to surmise that the complaints we listened to on the way to work last Monday were made because we are now accustomed to no flooding? Did Monday’s flood conditions catch us by surprise because we hadn’t seen flooding in the last three years despite many seasons of rainfall?
Have some of us really forgotten what we used to endure during the reign of the four presidents before H.E. David Granger took that oath? And have we paid attention to the reports from around the world in the past two weeks, of unseasonal rains, flooding, mud slides, tornados and other dramatic weather-related events? We really should be, because Climate change is no myth.
The people responsible for draining the City and coast would do well to implement that plan now that the lovely blue skies we enjoyed in recent weeks begin to disappear, replaced by heavy cumulus clouds which are surely ushering in our May-June rainy season.

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