Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Pe­nal/Debe res­i­dents’ homes were spared from flood­ing yes­ter­day, af­ter hours of rain­fall on Thurs­day prompt­ed the T&T Me­te­o­ro­log­i­cal Of­fice to is­sue a river­ine flood alert.

Ac­cord­ing to Pe­nal/Debe Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion (PDRC) chair­man Dr Allen Sam­my, all re­ports yes­ter­day in­di­cat­ed that flood­ing in­ci­dents were lim­it­ed to road­ways dur­ing high tide around mid-morn­ing.

He said parts of Su­chit Trace, Batchyia Branch Trace #2 and Raghu­nanan Trace ex­ten­sion, Good­man Trace and parts of Bar­rack­pore were flood­ed but there were no ma­jor re­ports of house­holds be­ing se­vere­ly af­fect­ed.

How­ev­er, Sam­my said farm­ers suf­fered loss­es.

“I’ve got no re­ports of house­hold (flood­ing), how­ev­er, we have heard that the agri­cul­tur­al lands are flood­ed, so I imag­ine there’s go­ing to be re­al loss­es in agri­cul­ture. It’s like­ly, of course, to have an im­pact on the cost of food,” he said.

As of yes­ter­day evening, he said the Cu­ra­ma­ta and Oropouche Rivers were near ca­pac­i­ty, but ad­mit­ted the wa­ter lev­els were de­creas­ing in the ab­sence of any sig­nif­i­cant rain­fall dur­ing yes­ter­day.

How­ev­er, he con­ced­ed that there could be more flood­ing should there be any sig­nif­i­cant rain­fall over the course of last night .

Sam­my said the re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tion’s Dis­as­ter Man­age­ment Unit re­mains on stand­by to as­sist res­i­dents should there be any fur­ther flood­ing.