On Wednes­day, Trinidad ex­pe­ri­enced 16 hours of se­vere weath­er which dumped up to 5.5 inch­es of rain across the is­land. While there were some floods and land­slides in the im­me­di­ate af­ter­math, the worst of the af­ter-ef­fects were ex­pe­ri­enced yes­ter­day, with the Tu­na­puna/Pi­ar­co, Ch­agua­nas, Pe­nal/Debe and Siparia mu­nic­i­pal­i­ties among the hard­est hit.

In the flood-prone Wood­land area in south Trinidad, res­i­dents tried to stave off the flood­ing by pool­ing their re­sources and hasti­ly build­ing up an em­bank­ment along the New Cut Chan­nel, which drains in­to the Godineau Riv­er. How­ev­er, while ar­eas in the north­ern part of the com­mu­ni­ty were spared, flood­wa­ters cov­ered streets and poured in­to hous­es in south Wood­land.

For many cit­i­zens, par­tic­u­lar­ly those who faced the worst of this week’s floods and land­slides, the ex­pe­ri­ence must have trig­gered bad mem­o­ries of the cat­a­stroph­ic weath­er events of Oc­to­ber 2018.

On that oc­ca­sion, the worst floods in decades fol­lowed two days of rain­fall on Oc­to­ber 19 and 20, which caused rivers in Ca­roni, Diego Mar­tin and Mar­aval to breach their banks. Res­i­dents in sur­round­ing com­mu­ni­ties had to be evac­u­at­ed, sev­er­al ar­eas were in­ac­ces­si­ble and mil­lions of dol­lars in prop­er­ty dam­age was in­curred.

More than 150,000 peo­ple were di­rect­ly af­fect­ed and the sit­u­a­tion was se­ri­ous enough for Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley to de­clare the event a na­tion­al dis­as­ter.

Al­most three years lat­er, ques­tions must be asked about the lev­el of dis­as­ter pre­pared­ness across the coun­try since then and whether enough was done by the rel­e­vant min­istries and agen­cies ahead of this year’s hur­ri­cane sea­son to mit­i­gate against floods and land­slides.

If that ques­tion is asked of res­i­dents who are to­day count­ing their loss­es and clean­ing up af­ter Wednes­day’s del­uge, their re­spons­es will be most­ly neg­a­tive. They would hard­ly have been con­vinced by Works Min­is­ter Ro­han Sinanan’s at­tempts at dam­age con­trol at a me­dia con­fer­ence yes­ter­day be­cause many of them, in­clud­ing res­i­dents of Green­vale in La Hor­quet­ta, would have been ner­vous­ly mon­i­tor­ing ris­ing lev­els in wa­ter­cours­es near their homes.

In 2018, scores of Green­vale res­i­dents bare­ly es­caped with their lives when flood­wa­ters al­most reached the roofs in some parts of the com­mu­ni­ty. Mit­i­ga­tion mea­sures put in place since then by the Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (HDC), in­clud­ing berms and ponds, seemed on the verge of giv­ing way yes­ter­day

This coun­try can­not af­ford to be lulled in­to a false sense of se­cu­ri­ty over our lo­ca­tion out­side the hur­ri­cane belt, not when our is­lands sit on the band of the In­ter-Trop­i­cal Con­ver­gence Zone (ITCZ) and are sus­cep­ti­ble to ex­treme and er­rat­ic rain­fall.

We have seen what hap­pens when all the runoff from those heavy rains pour down the steep slopes of our moun­tain ranges in­to low-ly­ing ar­eas, wreak­ing hav­oc.

Im­por­tant lessons should have been learned from the weath­er events of Oc­to­ber 2018 but the ex­pe­ri­ences of yes­ter­day and Wednes­day, which brought many ar­eas per­ilous­ly close to a re­peat of that dis­as­ter, sug­gest oth­er­wise.

At this stage in the 2021 hur­ri­cane sea­son, with weeks and months of se­vere weath­er ahead in the fore­cast, it will not take a di­rect hit from a trop­i­cal storm or hur­ri­cane for T&T to be­come a dis­as­ter zone.

Where T&T's dis­as­ter pre­ven­tion and pre­pared­ness are con­cerned, im­prove­ments are long over­due.