Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley be­lieves work done on the na­tion’s drainage in­fra­struc­ture fol­low­ing last Oc­to­ber’s floods played a ma­jor role in mit­i­gat­ing the ef­fects of Trop­i­cal Storm Karen on Sun­day.

Row­ley post­ed a two-minute ad­dress on his Face­book page from New York where was at­tend­ing the Unit­ed Na­tions Gen­er­al As­sem­bly in which he com­pared Sun­day’s weath­er to last year’s dev­as­tat­ing floods.

He said: “For­tu­nate­ly, un­like last year where 200,000 cit­i­zens were af­fect­ed di­rect­ly by ex­ten­sive flood­ing and trau­ma, this year, even though the rain­fall was of an equiv­a­lent lev­el, we have come out of it with some dam­age and a cer­tain amount of dis­rup­tion but cer­tain­ly not on the scale we ex­pe­ri­enced in 2018.

“We were con­sid­er­ably bet­ter pre­pared this year, we in­vest­ed a lot of re­sources in many of our wa­ter­cours­es, par­tic­u­lar­ly with the widen­ing of the Ca­roni riv­er and oth­er ma­jor wa­ter­cours­es . . . but more im­por­tant­ly, we were pre­pared to re­spond to the ef­fects of this ex­ces­sive rain­fall be­ing put on us in a very short space of time.”

The Prime Min­is­ter said he has been re­ceiv­ing con­tin­u­ous re­ports in New York, “from Rox­bor­ough to cen­tral and south Trinidad,” about the ef­fects of the trop­i­cal storm. He urged cit­i­zens to re­main vig­i­lant dur­ing the rainy sea­son as there re­mains the pos­si­bil­i­ty for sim­i­lar events to oc­cur.

Row­ley thanked state agen­cies and re­spon­ders who were re­quired to be on stand­by for any even­tu­al­i­ty and as­sured that “state agen­cies will do every­thing pos­si­ble to make com­fort­able those who have been dis­rupt­ed by these weath­er pat­terns.”

He added that the 2019 UN Cli­mate Ac­tion Sum­mit “will ad­dress this very im­por­tant is­sue as small is­land states con­tin­ue to grap­ple with the ef­fect of se­vere weath­er ac­tiv­i­ty.”