So, it’s the rainy season and the flooding has already started. As a two-time flooding victim myself - albeit more than 25 years ago - I can tell you it ranks among the top saddest and most unpleasant human experiences.
The numerous human
emotions that occasion slow and/or sudden washes of water through cherished
belongings and the accompanying sense of regret, danger, and loss are difficult
to describe and are best recorded only by people who have been there
themselves.
This is thus not the
kind of issue to explore through cynical, opportunistic political commentary or
even the cold instruments of scientific observation. There is little that can
comfort the affected. Insufficient sandbags to stem the flow of grief.
But it’s also a story
that begins long before the advent of the rainy season. In my role as a
journalism trainer, colleagues are perhaps fed-up of hearing me say that the
flooding event in June is the culmination of the private and official
behaviours of January.
Telling the story of
June without referencing what happened in January is therefore often an
unpardonable journalistic omission, especially since it’s a tale of pervasive malpractice
at different levels.
The fact that this is a
multi-dimensional issue makes it difficult to engage in a society at all levels
set on applying simple, linear diagnoses to complex challenges. There is
science, but this is also perilous emotional terrain.
For, yes, proper
development planning has been almost absolutely absent over our independent
years, but there are critical socio-cultural antecedents that are difficult to
ignore.
So, the Town and
Country Planning Division and other central and local agencies can be flagged
for chronic, multiple failure; but independent citizen predisposition and
behaviour are not to be overlooked.
For example, slash and
burn agriculture on the hills “to make (an honest) dollar” in February, now
flows in volumes of disassembled soil to fill the watercourses and to challenge
production of potable water.
“Water, water
everywhere and not a drop to drink” – as if there exists a magical funnel in
the sky to channel rainwater into the pipes that keep households, communities,
industry, and commerce alive.
Then there is the
ubiquitous role of “drainage” and embankments as cure-alls, important as they
are, against the reality of extreme weather events, established geographical
watersheds, and changing ocean tides. Surely, the hydrologists recoil in terror
at the thought of island-splitting man-made torrents directed at a supposedly endless,
accommodating sea.
It's also not simply a
matter of litter - whatever its important, contributory role. That too, must
end. But that’s not all there is to it.
It may well be the
silent view of many experts in such things, that there are communities essentially
unviable over the long term.
True, the same has been
said of some nation states even as they persist - small in size, perennially
endangered by nature, economically vulnerable, chronically under-developed, and
evidently versed in acts of collective societal suicide.
But this is no cue for
surrender. It is, instead, a call for decision-making that is cohesive,
collective, and rooted in inconvenient facts.
It’s not a challenge
unique to us in T&T. For example, I have lived and worked in Guyana and
know that the challenge of Georgetown bears painfully obvious solutions largely
left unspoken, and which no one dared utter ahead of Monday’s local government
elections there.
I have also been to
Belize where Belmopan became the nominal capital in 1970 when Belize City
proved to be overly and expensively vulnerable to annual storms and hurricanes.
So many years later,
the inland capital is yet to become the thriving hub of national life the
original coastal city has remained. We learn from this that it clearly takes
more than engineering and politics to address societal imperative and survival instinct.
In Jamaica last week, I
witnessed the scourge of flooding in communities positioned along the banks of deep
and shallow gullies where mountain run-off is noted to have become increasingly
torrential.
It seems that everywhere
in our region there is a need to sit around the tables of decision-making to
work on ways to match science, politics, culture, and the proceeds of history. It
calls for a significant downing of political and communal arms.
In our case, such an approach
apparently confronts a gloomy future with advancing floods and accompanying
pain and grief. There are hard facts left to be faced.
