One wonders what else there is to say about flooding in Guyana that hasn’t be said many times before. Yet the experience of 2005 notwithstanding, we still lurch from one flood to the next while being given the usual litany of excuses – the highest rainfall since whenever, or La Niña, or citizens dumping garbage in the drainage system, and so on and so forth. It is not that these things are not true, it is just that the public is conscious of the absence of some comprehensive and systematic approach to our complex drainage issues. It is indeed the case that work has been done on the East Demerara Water Conservancy (EDWC) since the Great Flood, but what has been promoted as the panacea for the problems in relation to it – the Hope Canal, a massively expensive project currently under way – may not in the view of some be a panacea after all. At least, Guyanese engineers both here and in the diaspora have expressed reservations about the efficacy of the canal, and last week even one Mahaica farmer told our reporter that “people from D&I [National Drainage and Irrigation Authority] tell we that it won’t do the work they saying it would do to prevent the situation.”
The situation he is talking about is the release of water from the EDWC through the Maduni sluice onto the farms in the Mahaica and the Mahaicony. The conservancy, which covers a vast area, was built in the nineteenth century, and although a remarkable feat for its time, does not meet modern standards of engineering by a long chalk. The water is retained within a mud dam, and over the many decades of its existence silt has built up inside the conservancy, while the dam itself has been subject to attrition and weakening in parts. Once the water reaches danger level, there is a grave risk that the northern dam will give way and cause a catastrophe along the lower East Coast and the East Bank.
Before the water reaches the danger level, as said above, the authorities release it into the creek, and by extension onto the farmlands. This was done most famously in 2005, but has been repeated since then, the most recent occasion being last week. At the time of the Great Flood a group of farmers from Mahaica and Mahaicony had written this newspaper a letter, describing themselves as the “martyrs,” and in effect suggesting that they had been sacrificed to save ‘Georgetown,’ although it was understood that it had to be done. In more recent times, however, the affected farmers have not surprisingly been altogether less understanding. In addition, quite a few residents appear to have left the area, presumably because they cannot see any long-term future in staying, given the periodic flood conditions.
We reported on Friday that Region Five Chairman Bindrabhan Bisnauth said that excavators were working around the clock in the Mahaicony area, where several outfalls had been cleaned while the MMA-ADA had been clearing and raising the dams in the region of the Mahaicony Creek. In the Black Bush Polder on the Corentyne – which is also flooded but of course not as a consequence of the EDWC – our reporter was told that the floodwaters were not receding in Johanna and Yakusari because a section of the outfall channel needed desilting. The Regional Chairman David Armogan told this newspaper that excavators were working to clear it, and he went on to say that other outfall channels were also silted up, and that emergency works were in progress in relation to these. In addition, the region had repaired the doors of sluices which were not functioning.
The regional authorities which are in place now are not, of course, the same ones which were there before the election, but the average reader perusing our reports on the flooding will inevitably still be wondering why it is that in these situations we always seem to be treating as emergency measures things which should be part of regular maintenance. Why, for example, are outfall channels being desilted only after the flood comes? Why are they not cleared on a routine basis? And why are sluice doors not monitored according to a schedule and repaired immediately some problem reveals itself? And why can’t dams be kept clear, and raised before the rainy season comes around. It is not as if our weather patterns have become so unpredictable that in most years we don’t know when the dry and rainy seasons will fall.
The Mahaica-Mahaicony areas have the additional problem of the conservancy, but the farmers who try to make their living there grasp very well the larger approach which has to be taken to give them relief. One of them, Mr Shrikant, told our reporter on Thursday that following the flood last year, the then Minister of Agriculture Robert Persaud had met the farmers and had promised to raise the dams in several areas, as well as provide machinery to effect “protective works.” A “whole heap of promises,” Mr Shrikant ruefully observed, “still deh pon paper.” The farmer and his brother were of the view that a broad plan needed to be drawn up with the involvement of all the stakeholders, including members of the opposition to bring the situation under control.
The government has set great store on its ‘Grow More Food’ campaign, but it cannot possibly expect that the farmers will deliver on the programme if key agricultural areas lose crops year after year because of flooding. After two decades in office and one disaster seven years ago, the government really has run out of excuses. Whatever ‘systems‘ it has in place to deal with drainage are clearly not working and we seem locked in an endless cycle of floods with authorities at one level or another scrambling to respond after the crisis has hit. It will be impossible to stop flooding altogether, but if it continues as an annual occurrence then it will kill horticulture and livestock rearing in some of our foremost farming localities.
The new Minister of Agriculture Leslie Ramsammy made his pilgrimage to some of the water-logged areas, including Mahaica-Mahaicony, last week, and yesterday we reported him as saying: “A lot of our energy is going to shift and focus almost entirely on the MMA area, also the Pomeroon and Canal No 1 and 2 Polder…“ Whether the residents of those areas, particularly the first named, are any more sanguine about positive results eventuating from his statements than they were about those of his predecessor is not clear, but one suspects they are not. Mr Deolall, a Mahaicony farmer told our reporter on Thursday, “We only hope now is parliament… and I hoping that with the opposition having more say in parliament, that something is done for we the residents of Mahaicony Creek.” The opposition should pay attention, and add drainage in the critical farming communities to their already lengthy agenda; too many livelihoods are at stake for this to be ignored.
And the government really has to take on board the general approach of the Shrikant brothers, and meet with farmers, other stakeholders and engineers and review the drainage infrastructure and protocols in the affected areas up and down the coast, to see if the ongoing problems cannot be alleviated on a longer-term basis. In the meantime, the administration must be prepared to give all farmers some form of compensation, particularly in the case of Mahaica-Mahaicony, where the flooding was as much a man-made disaster as a natural one.
