Ot­to Car­ring­ton

Se­nior Re­porter

ot­to.car­ring­ton@guardian.co.tt

With flood­wa­ters fi­nal­ly re­ced­ing in sev­er­al parts of cen­tral Trinidad, lo­cal au­thor­i­ties have turned their fo­cus to clean-up ef­forts, dam­age as­sess­ments and long-term in­fra­struc­ture con­cerns.

Dur­ing a site vis­it along the Ca­roni River­bank near Shel­don Trace yes­ter­day, Coun­cil­lor for St Au­gus­tine South/Pi­ar­co/St He­le­na Richard Ram­per­sad said the past few days have been “ex­treme­ly hec­tic” as com­mu­ni­ties strug­gled to re­cov­er from se­vere flood­ing ear­li­er in the week.

Ram­per­sad, who is over­see­ing the as­sess­ment process, added: “Now that the wa­ter has sub­sided, we are con­duct­ing dam­age as­sess­ments to get a clear­er pic­ture of the ex­tent of the flood­ing’s im­pact.”

He said the Tu­na­puna/Pi­ar­co Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion’s Dis­as­ter Man­age­ment Unit (TPRC) is al­so doc­u­ment­ing af­fect­ed res­i­dents and itemis­ing their loss­es.

This in­for­ma­tion will be for­ward­ed to the Min­istry of the Peo­ple, So­cial De­vel­op­ment and Fam­i­ly Ser­vices for po­ten­tial com­pen­sa­tion.

In com­mu­ni­ties along Madras Road, many were still clean­ing up af­ter the floods. Res­i­dents were seen sweep­ing out mud and hos­ing down dri­ve­ways and dis­card­ing wa­ter­logged fur­ni­ture and dam­aged ap­pli­ances.

Sev­er­al said they nev­er ex­pect­ed the wa­ter to rise so quick­ly.

“It crept in,” one res­i­dent said, “and be­fore we knew it, the liv­ing room was un­der­wa­ter.”

As he walked along the south­ern banks of the Ca­roni Riv­er, Ram­per­sad ex­pressed con­cern about vis­i­ble ero­sion in the area.

“This part of the riv­er bends at about a 45-de­gree an­gle, and the pres­sure has sig­nif­i­cant­ly weak­ened the em­bank­ment,” he not­ed.

“We’re see­ing se­vere ero­sion, and if it con­tin­ues unchecked, it could even­tu­al­ly cause the riv­er to breach its banks and flood near­by com­mu­ni­ties—sim­i­lar to what hap­pened in Ibis Gar­dens a few days ago.”

Ram­per­sad said a lack of in­fra­struc­tur­al in­vest­ment by the last ad­min­is­tra­tion has made the sit­u­a­tion worse.

“This ero­sion didn’t hap­pen overnight. It’s the re­sult of years of ne­glect,” he said.

“Had prop­er work been done be­fore, like build­ing a re­in­forced con­crete re­ten­tion wall, we might not be fac­ing this lev­el of risk to­day.”

He at­trib­uted the re­duced dam­age in his elec­toral dis­trict to flood mit­i­ga­tion ef­forts un­der­tak­en by the new­ly in­stalled ad­min­is­tra­tion.

“Since tak­ing of­fice, we’ve em­barked on a mas­sive drain-clean­ing and de-silt­ing cam­paign. That proac­tive ap­proach helped lim­it the dam­age this time,” Ram­per­sad said.

“We’ve on­ly been in of­fice for a month, but I be­lieve the work we’ve done so far made a re­al dif­fer­ence.”