David Patterson must be the most unfortunate of ministers. There he was, blessed with that all-important attribute which is so rarely found among members of Guyana’s governing classes ‒ common sense ‒ setting up task forces, getting pumps mended, desilting canals and generally cleaning up Georgetown, when we were visited by yet another pluvial inundation. And this time, the rain was relentless. So here we are again, with rivers flowing down our major thoroughfares and lakes swirling in suburbia. Venice, it must be said, has nothing on GT.
Minister Patterson’s activism and practicality has resulted in the cleanest city we have seen in decades, in addition to which all the pumps are operational and only one sluice – that at Sussex Street – non-functional because it is under repairs. Clearing the outfalls is a much more large-scale and costly operation, but work was due to start on that if it has not already done so. The Minister’s task force for Georgetown was later expanded to encompass flooding in all the regions, and he had, incidentally, also expressed an interest in a general restoration of the capital.
And yet, after all of that, we are submerged once more, with the city’s flooding problems being replicated along the lower East Coast as well. The Minister had said before that the gravity drainage on which Georgetown depends was now insufficient to take off the accumulated water with the expedition which is required, and there is no resident who will disagree with him there. How we reached this point is well known, and contrary to the rather silly press release issued by the PPP/C, the origin of our flooding issues goes back at least two decades, if not more. It did not begin in the two months or so since the coalition assumed office; the previous government boasts innumerable flooding episodes of its own, not the least of which was the 2005 Great Flood.
In terms of the city, at least (as opposed to the conservancy to which the last administration did direct both effort and finances), there were no sustained attempts on the part of the previous government to address the problems with a long-term view in mind, or to look at the infrastructure with the intention of making it fit for purpose. Furthermore, the fractious relations between the last government and the city council were not conducive to getting anything much done, while the former’s choice of key municipal officers served to hinder the implementation of any meaningful measures which might have been suggested.
But that is in the past. Yesterday, the media were informed that President David Granger held a 4 am emergency cabinet meeting – this must be a first – which was resumed at 8 am. Having learnt from the experience of 2005, no doubt, the government acted with some dispatch, directing an aerial survey of the coast to establish the extent of the flooding, and the establishment of shelters where necessary, among other things.
What is clearly needed, however, is a thorough review of the drainage infrastructure, following which decisions would have to be taken about what would be required to drain the city and the coast effectively; what protocols would be necessary to maintain that infrastructure, and how the bureaucratic responsibilities should be apportioned for greatest efficiency. All of that would take huge sums, something of which the government is well aware. However, one presumes that cognizance would be taken in the budget of the coast’s drainage imperatives, and the citizens of Georgetown in particular await to see what the administration’s plans are in that department.
But there is something else too: The presumption is that some of our problems relate to issues connected to global warming, and in the popular mind the thinking is that the incidence of the kind of flooding we have been seeing in recent years will increase. Governments with possible five-year life spans are rarely keen on looking at the long term, but in this instance they owe it to us to do so.
We need to contract specialists in the field to review our coastal prospects, and advise us about what we could expect in say ten, twenty and thirty years’ time. How viable is our existence on the coast, and in particular, in Georgetown? What kind of drainage adjustments would we have to make to continue living in the most fertile part of Guyana? We need to know the nature of the issues we might have to face further down the line, so we can gauge whether we can address them, and if we can, how that is best done.
