Divine intervention

Yesterday half of Trinidad seemed to be under water. On the north-south highway flood waters swirled over both carriageways, almost submerging some cars, while others turned back, crawled up the embankments or sank into the mud of the central median. People found three or four feet of water in their homes. The oil refinery at Pointe-à-Pierre was flooded out. CHAOS, said the headlines this morning.

Last Saturday’s heavy rain was part of a system that has turned into Hurricane Gustav and seems to be heading for New Orleans. But yesterday’s rain was simply localised as far as I can see, not connected with any passing tropical wave, let alone anything more serious. The Met Office said it was “normal” for the wet season. Just as the cleared, denuded hillsides are “normal”, the silted rivers are “normal”, the blocked drains are “normal”, and hence flooding is “normal”. We all expect this in the wet season, every year. We are accustomed to the press photos of distraught householders standing in their living rooms with dirty water up to their thighs or waists, their sofas floating in the background, their kids swimming down the road.

It’s odd that a country with a TT$45 billion budget, and a desire to become a “developed nation” by 2020, can’t figure out how to fix its drains. The connection between deforested hillsides, silted-up waterways, blocked drains and flooding doesn’t seem to occur to the powers-that-be. The minister of works, questioned about the regular flooding in Port of Spain every time it rains heavily, is apt to speak about a grandiose scheme for pumping water backwards out of the city, though no one seems to know how this would work, when it might start, or why it’s not necessary to clean rivers and drains in the meantime.

And if Trinidad is ever hit by a serious tropical storm or a hurricane, heaven knows what the outcome would be. Much of the ramshackle infrastructure would be blown away, along with much of the housing, and the choked drainage system would guarantee a nightmare of flooding which would certainly take lives, perhaps on a large scale.

Trinidadians say “God is a Trini”, meaning “we won’t get a hurricane”. Trinidad has actually coped with hurricanes in the past, a fact that no one remembers. But that’s when rivers and drains were kept clear, and people did not depend on divine intervention.