Joshua Seemungal and Charles Kong Soo
On October 5, T&T was hit hard by a tropical wave that caused severe flash flooding, landslides, marooned vehicles, felled trees, and caused traffic chaos as well as power outages. The rains continued for days after and up until yesterday.
Forty-four-year-old Theresa Lynch's body was found on Friday after she was washed away by floodwaters while attempting to cross a ravine in Surrey Village, Lopinot, on Wednesday.
An Arima man Narine Persad escaped death when he was rescued from raging flood waters by his nephew while attempting to help his mother secure her belongings when flood waters started to rise along the Arima Old Road, D'Abadie.
Citizens from as far as Tobago, Toco and along the East-West Corridor, St Helena and Caroni were left in distress, cleaning up their homes and communities while counting their losses after the deluge.
In Bon Air, Arouca
"The cars, furniture, stereo, you name it...I had a treasured turntable, I treasured that for years, that’s all muddied, gone through. In 2008, we experienced flooding similar to this, but not like what we had Wednesday," said Leo Abraham.
Wednesday, Abraham said, "surpassed everything".
While sitting in church waiting patiently for a funeral service to begin at 10 am, Abraham received a frantic call from his wife and daughter. The river is high and it is about to breach the walls at their Carnelian Street in Bon Air West, they told him, terrified of what was about to happen.
Leaving the funeral before it began, he raced home to be by their side.
Arriving home, Abraham was stunned to see how much the water level increased during the short period that he left home.
Hours later, about two feet of water rose to as high as four feet, drenching everything in his yard and home with mud and water.
Abraham was grateful that his family escaped without loss of life or injury.
However, the flooding did claim a few items close to his heart, like his treasured photo albums with family and work memories.
"Whatsoever was destroyed could always be replaced. The only thing is I had some albums, some photo albums from my work and my family, and so on…memories lost…That hurt me a lot. That hurt, boy," he lamented.
Abraham said while there are long weeks ahead, full of work to get his home back in order, he was moved and inspired by the selfless assistance offered by the corporation, his councillor and volunteers.
He said in the face of so much damage, the very best of people was able to shine through in helping one another.
Extensive damage inside Rhea Bishop's home in Toco.
In Mission Village, Toco
As the heavy rain from tropical wave Invest #91L poured down in Toco, Rhea Bishop, of Mission Village, waited anxiously, hoping the land on the hill behind her home would hold up.
In all the years she has lived there, she never experienced major landslides before, but the rain last week was about to change that.
At around 10 pm, the first signs that the land was slipping appeared.
Seven hours later, at 5 am on Thursday, mayhem.
The entire hill came crashing down.
"It burst the wall into two at my property at the back, which basically no longer exists because it came all the way down. It burst one of the bedroom walls into two and everything inside there would have been destroyed. It would have continued throughout the entire house and then, with that room being filled, the water and mud spilt out into everything else," Bishop said.
"So far, I only have my stove and my fridge. I’m not sure about the stove because I haven’t used it yet. The furniture and everything got soaked."
Thursday morning’s chaos came at a time when Bishop and her two children were just starting to feel whole again.
Water and mud pouring into Rhea Bishop's home.
In March, she lost her beloved father.
"I’m struggling to cope because my father would have died. It was just him and my two girls. It was just the four of us who lived here. Thankfully, the father of my girls is staying with us and helping us now. So, we were now getting over his death and then this happened," she lamented
"We haven’t even started to clean yet. We now start to move the rubble."
As if the clean-up effort was not daunting enough, Bishop’s water tanks are empty.
She said the last time she got water was in August.
"I still don’t have water to clean the place out. We have to remove the rubble, then we have to sanitise and we don’t even know where the water is coming from. We don’t know how to start that aspect of the cleaning," she added.
It is going to be a long few weeks and months ahead for Bishop and her two daughters.
But having some water in her tanks, she said, will certainly make it a bit easier.
Barath Rampersad's kale and celery field inundated by water in Aranguez North, Thursday.
CHARLES KONG SOO
In Aranguez
Recollecting the foreboding weather pattern that wreaked havoc on their crops, Rennie Bedassie, of Aranguez North, said with a tinge of anxiety, "The rain started from 10:30 am Wednesday non-stop until this morning. It was too much for the area's drainage in Aranguez which was poorly done. We need proper drainage to pull out the flood water from our fields and sometimes we need three or four pumps to pump out the excess water."
The hours of hard work in the fields under an unforgiving sun were evident in his face and body when he spoke about his losses. "I have pakchoi in various stages of cultivation, in 3/4 acres of land and all are underwater. I can't quantify my losses yet and there are more than 200 farmers who are affected; that amounts to tens of thousands in losses."
He said he did not call the Ministry of Agriculture yet, normally farmers had their flood claims inside but they did not really get help from the Government.
Almost dejectedly, Bedassie said that they became so disenchanted that sometimes when they do get flooded out, they did not even bother to report it.
He said that as recently as June, he was flooded out and lost all of his melongene crops and received no compensation for it.
