GAIL ALEXAN­DER

“Com­plete­ly un­ac­cept­able, Mr David - cit­i­zens must nev­er ac­cept flood­ing as the new nor­mal!”

That’s the view of UNC Oropouche West MP De­ven­dranath Tan­coo re­gard­ing com­ments by Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Min­istry of­fi­cial Jer­ry David that cit­i­zens must ac­cept the oc­cur­rence of flood­ing and adapt to its dev­as­tat­ing ef­fects on their lives.

Tan­coo, in a state­ment yes­ter­day not­ed that in a re­cent me­dia re­port, the Min­istry’s Se­nior Dis­as­ter Man­age­ment Co­or­di­na­tor David, said be­cause of cli­mate change and oth­er fac­tors, flood­ing has be­come a world­wide phe­nom­e­non.

Tan­coo re­spond­ed, “This is com­plete­ly un­ac­cept­able! It is of­fen­sive to ex­pect that cit­i­zens of Oropouche West must ac­cept the Row­ley’s gov­ern­ment’s fail­ures to clean and main­tain the wa­ter­cours­es and to un­der­take over­due, crit­i­cal in­fra­struc­tur­al de­vel­op­ment. What is even more re­pul­sive is the im­pli­ca­tion that this fail­ure must be ac­cept­ed as the new nor­mal.”

“Af­ter five years, the gov­ern­ment fi­nal­ly ad­mit­ted that they had no plan to deal with flood­ing. Yet, four months ago, Min­is­ter Ro­han Sinanan asked the pop­u­la­tion to vote for the PNM be­cause they need­ed five years to erad­i­cate flood­ing in T&T!”

Tan­coo not­ed Sinanan told the pop­u­la­tion then that a con­sul­tant had been en­gaged “to make a com­pre­hen­sive op­er­a­tional drainage plan from all the pre­vi­ous stud­ies done”.

But he said it took gov­ern­ment five years and bil­lions of tax­pay­ers’ dol­lars to de­cide to con­duct what es­sen­tial­ly is a re­view of ex­ist­ing drainage plans.”

Tan­coo said Oropouche West, is a ma­jor riv­er basin that acts as nat­ur­al wa­ter drainage for ar­eas as far as Moru­ga, Bar­rack­pore through Siparia, Pe­nal, Debe, La Ro­maine, Pa­lo Seco, Palmiste, Fyz­abad, Her­mitage and Wood­land.

“Rivers and their trib­u­taries need con­tin­u­ous main­te­nance, sluice gates need to be re­paired or re­placed and pumps need to be in­stalled. Yet for the past five years the lev­el of ge­o­graph­i­cal dis­crim­i­na­tion is as­tound­ing!

“While homes, gar­dens, busi­ness­es and roads are flood­ed, and thou­sands of lives are put at health and safe­ty risks with the ac­com­pa­ny­ing mil­lions of dol­lars in loss­es, it was re­port­ed that five new pumps, which cost tax­pay­ers $18 mil­lion re­main in stor­age, un­al­lo­cat­ed by the Min­is­ter of Works.”

He said many res­i­dents are yet to re­ceive com­pen­sa­tion promised by the gov­ern­ment for the mas­sive flood dam­age they ex­pe­ri­enced each year since 2017.

Oropouche West, res­i­dents are fur­ther con­cerned var­i­ous gov­ern­men­tal agen­cies don’t ap­pear to be com­mu­ni­cat­ing with each oth­er. He added:

“Ad­dress­ing flood­ing re­quires a col­lab­o­ra­tive ef­fort be­tween the Min­istry of Works and the Min­istry of Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment. Per­haps right foot is not fol­low­ing left foot? While they play word games and can­not get their act to­geth­er, con­stituents con­tin­ue to have their lives thrown in­to tur­moil when­ev­er rain falls!”

“What else are we, over­bur­dened be­lea­guered cit­i­zens sup­posed to adapt to? In­creas­ing un­em­ploy­ment? Woe­ful­ly in­ad­e­quate health­care? No wa­ter? Pot­holed roads? Rot­ting bridges? As­tro­nom­i­cal tax­es with no val­ue for mon­ey? To­tal­ly un­ac­cept­able! “

“This cal­lous dis­re­gard for the lives and liveli­hood of cit­i­zens in­clud­ing those in the new flood zones through­out the coun­try, is high­ly ob­nox­ious! We must nev­er adapt to in­com­pe­tence, cor­rup­tion and mis­man­age­ment and to ask that tax­pay­ers to ac­cept this as nor­mal is be­yond rep­re­hen­si­ble.”