Seigo­nie Mo­hammed

Cli­mate Change Ed­i­tor

seigo­nie.mo­hammed@guardian.co.tt

A burst of tor­ren­tial rain was all it took to bring parts of Port-of-Spain and west­ern Trinidad to a crawl yes­ter­day, as flood­wa­ters swal­lowed streets and backed up traf­fic.

The mid-af­ter­noon del­uge trig­gered street flood­ing across Down­town Port-of-Spain, Diego Mar­tin and Mar­aval, once again ex­pos­ing the dis­rup­tion that heavy rain­fall rou­tine­ly caus­es along the west­ern cor­ri­dor.

The rain­fall came as a weak trough, com­bined with mois­ture and at­mos­pher­ic in­sta­bil­i­ty, in­creased the like­li­hood of show­ers and iso­lat­ed thun­der­storms across Trinidad and To­ba­go.

But the sud­den switch from op­pres­sive heat to flood­ing should not be con­sid­ered un­usu­al.

The coun­try re­mains un­der a Yel­low-Lev­el Hot Spell Alert through Oc­to­ber 31. While warn­ing of el­e­vat­ed tem­per­a­tures, the Trinidad and To­ba­go Me­te­o­ro­log­i­cal Ser­vice (TTMS) specif­i­cal­ly notes that rain­fall as­so­ci­at­ed with trop­i­cal waves, the In­ter-Trop­i­cal Con­ver­gence Zone and oth­er weath­er sys­tems can still oc­cur dur­ing the lo­cal heat sea­son.

And with the wet sea­son con­tin­u­ing, yes­ter­day’s flood­ing may not be the last.

Al­though TTMS ex­pects over­all rain­fall be­tween Oc­to­ber and De­cem­ber to be be­low nor­mal, its sea­son­al out­look still puts Trinidad’s flood­ing po­ten­tial at low to mod­er­ate and urges the pub­lic to clear drains and mon­i­tor chang­ing weath­er con­di­tions.