In just ten minutes, walls crumbled, roads cracked and cars drifted into ravines as severe flash flooding left many Arouca residents reeling on Wednesday.
“My children still traumatised!” a Dunderhill Road resident told Guardian Media at the site of the second location where a vehicle was washed away.
The car, beyond salvaging, lay in a crumpled heap wedged between the underside of a bridge and a tree trunk, water gushing around it.
That resident would have seen the fate of the vehicle first hand. He showed a video recording of the incident where a woman is heard screaming, “Oh God! The car going down! And where the person who was driving?”
Thankfully, no one was in the car at the time. A few moments later, the owners of the vehicle arrived and a young man jumped into the drain to salvage a driver’s permit from inside the vehicle, as well as some of the car’s mechanical parts.
Ten strides to the left took the Guardian Media news team to the first vehicle which was washed away.
The owner, Kez Alleyne, said the most he could have saved was the chrome rims of his black Toyota.
“Boy, it wasn’t even a half hour of rain,” he explained while looking down at his vehicle.
“I was sleeping and I get a call to move my car but by the time I come down the water come down heavy already, so I couldn’t even go to the car so I had to watch it wash away.”
Meanwhile, some residents along Volute and Carnelian Streets will have to rebuild, after a powerful water flow knocked down the parts of their wall closest to a massive drain that services the community of Bon Air West.
In one case, the water breached the wall, flooding out the property and damaging the three vehicles in the yard, one of them a BMW.
“He would have lost everything on the lower level,” resident Liseli Benjamin said, adding: “I have never seen anything like this, I would have been here for 17 years and I have never seen flooding like this in Bon Air West, we really hoping this man has insurance.”
On Volute Street and Dunderhill Road, the streets were damaged and now require immediate repair.
Guardian Media heard stories of harrowing escapes at the peak of the flash floods, where some residents were forced to jump their walls to escape the rapidly rising water level.
There was speculation within the community as to what led to this level of what many called unprecedented flooding.
“Is them farmers up the mountains, they grade down the land,” an elderly gentleman said in passing.
“Don’t worry with he,” a lady chimed in, “we need some bigger drains now because more of us living here.” Guardian Media reached out to the Member of Parliament for Lopinot/Bon Air West Marvin Gonzales, who said he was not aware of any agriculture developments that have degraded the lands in the northern range. He reminded that the flooding was happening “all over, from Grande all the way down, the intensity of the rainfall was really bad.”
