Shal­iza?Has­sanali

By the end of 2015, wide­spread flood­ing in Port-of-Spain will be a thing of the past. This was the date giv­en by Min­is­ter of the En­vi­ron­ment and Wa­ter Re­sources Gan­ga Singh dur­ing a tour of the drainage net­work sys­tem in the cap­i­tal city, which fre­quent­ly floods fol­low­ing heavy down­pours.

Not­ing that af­ter every del­uge the Gov­ern­ment has had to de­silt chan­nels in Port-of-Spain and en­vi­rons, Singh said the bill for this ex­er­cise was a heavy price for tax­pay­ers to pay. "When they do the de­silt­ing I saw a fig­ure of $10 mil­lion last year. That is on­ly dur­ing a six months du­ra­tion. If you are go­ing to have $10 mil­lion for de­silt­ing that is mon­ey down the drain, so to speak."

Ad­dress­ing the me­dia yes­ter­day in com­pa­ny of drainage en­gi­neer Ram­dath Ba­boolal, Singh first viewed a de­ten­tion pond in Sea Lots which traps wa­ter from the hills and takes it down­stream. The pond is the first phase of a Port-of-Spain flood al­le­vi­a­tion pro­gramme, with the sec­ond phase be­ing fo­cused West of the East Dry Riv­er.

"De­sign for East Dry Riv­er is ad­vanced now and con­struc­tion will start short­ly," Ba­boolal said. He said it would cost tax­pay­ers $69 mil­lion to al­le­vi­ate flood­ing in Port-of-Spain South alone, which con­sti­tutes nine de­vel­op­men­tal pack­ages that are be­ing de­signed by Geni­var which will be rolled out in the com­ing months.

Singh said he has giv­en an un­der­tak­ing that by the end of 2015, flood­ing will be elim­i­nat­ed. "There is no overnight so­lu­tion. You are talk­ing about cu­mu­la­tive prob­lems over four and five decades. It can be done with ma­jor in­vest­ments and tech­ni­cal ex­per­tise."

How­ev­er, in the in­ter­im, con­trac­tors have been mo­bilised to clear all chan­nels blocked with silt and garbage. Singh said chan­nels lead­ing to the sea are clogged, while build­ing have been built over them. On Tues­day, the Bev­er­age Con­tain­er Bill, Singh said, will be laid in the Sen­ate, which would as­sist in flood mit­i­ga­tion.

"The mal­a­dy is deep," said Singh, stat­ing that drainage in­fra­struc­ture "had not kept apace with de­vel­op­men­tal work in the city. There is need for sig­nif­i­cant in­vest­ment in putting down new and to ex­pand ex­ist­ing in­fra­struc­ture to deal with the drainage prob­lem."

Singh said his min­istry along with the Min­istry of Plan­ning are work­ing with the IDB to source fund­ing to un­der­take this task.