Friday, September 5 2008

GOVERNMENT yesterday admitted that its construction drive has contributed to recent instances of flash flooding and has unveiled an accelerated, inter-ministerial programme of river dredging to start within one week.

“We certainly need to look at the effect and the impact of government construction,” Works and Transport Minister Colm Imbert said yesterday, one week after blaming flash flooding on the failure by private developers to adhere to building and drainage codes.

“If you have a green field area that is forest or savannah and you convert that into housing where there was grass and there were trees before, now there are roofs, so that the run-off would increase dramatically,” Imbert said near the end of yesterday’s post-Cabinet press briefing at the Office of the Prime Minister in St Clair.

“Certainly we will have to look again at the impact of construction and rainfall and flooding and so on. There are all sorts of reasons why we had that terrible flooding at Claxton Bay. The question of it being man-made was being highlighted but there are other issues,” he said in reference to last week’s freak flash-flooding in south Trinidad. The admission came as the Government unveiled an aggressive plan to deal with the effects of increased levels of rainfall.

“We are hoping to effectively double the work we are doing at the present time and intensify the clearing of rivers and watercourses,” Imbert said. “The Ministry of Local Government will also be given the necessary resources to accelerate and intensify its own programme of clearing of watercourses,” he added.

“The objective is to ensure that every single major watercourse in the country is cleared because of this particular rainy season and hurricane season,” Imbert said.