The rains at last

By the time you read this the yellow and the pink poui trees should be blazing forth in floral celebration.

Yes, we have seen some of these already, stimulated by the isolated showers which have been teasing our parched land, but the literal explosions of colour, on our hills, across our savannahs and along our highways should be with us all today.

And the greening of our hillsides and parched countryside will follow. Leaves will return to seemingly skeletal trees, and grasses will sprout again from the blackened earth where misguided people have “cleaned” the land with fire.

These first rains bring new life to our land, the hillsides and forests; variegated green hillsides begin embracing the jewels of all the flowering trees. This is all very comforting, even cooling of course, following the harsh dry season. But it has not been too harsh a dry season this year.

There have been fewer bush fires — especially across the southern face of the northern range — this year. Additionally, we had rains in February and early March before the dry season really settled on the land.

And these rains added precious water to our main reservoirs, so we have not been forced to impose water curfews as in recent years. So we should welcome the rains with a reasonable sense of relief rather than as an answer to desperate prayers.

So why then are there communities across central and south Trinidad which have no water in their mains and their homes? These shortages cannot be caused by the dry season if there is water in the main reservoirs.

And indeed, why are the popular beaches of Maracas and Las Cuevas without a water supply for visitors there--- little has been said of the residents of these two communities regarding water for their homes.

Is there water in the villages, but not at the beach facilities? And if so, then these shortages cannot be caused by the dry season? Certainly all of the streams along the north coast are still flowing, so once again it appears that human failings, rather than the dry season, are punishing our citizens.

So while the showers may cool and nourish the land, the rains may not be bringing water supplies to the people of central and south Trinidad, nor the beach users at Maracas and Las Cuevas.

The problems here remain as they have always been—failure of the people who are paid to deliver services to us. And the tasks are not difficult, or beyond us.

They are simply not undertaken, and our country continues to fall apart because of wilful neglect.

And we continue to appear powerless to deal with the issues which continue to bring us down. Whether it is repairing pipes or oil storage tanks at Petrotrin, or delivering water through existing pipelines at WASA, or providing marine transport to Tobago, finding a new commissioner of police, or appointing new judges to our courts, we fail. As we fail, we all seem to be very good at casting blame elsewhere and at washing our collective hands of responsibility for the failures all around us. We always have water to wash our hands and clean ourselves of responsibility for our ongoing failures.

However, as welcome as the rains are following the dry season, they soon present us with other problems, mostly flooding and landslips. As I drive the roads of the East-West Corridor, I notice that the river beds are still cluttered with garbage and tall grass. It seems that we can never clear any of these drains in the dry months—we must wait until the flooding occurs before we understand that drains and rivers clogged with bush and garbage cause more flooding than the actual rainfall.

We have been extremely lucky in that major rain events have largely spared our islands.

In November last year we had one—in the remote side of the northern range, between Grande Riviere and Blanchisseuse. In the forests, mountain streams rose 40 feet deep with rushing water.

One can go into the forests to this day, and see forest debris still stuck high in the trees bordering the streams.

As I have written here before, if that rainstorm had fallen on the southern side of the mountains, whole communities in the East-West Corridor would have been swept away.

The flooding would be much worse because the hills and valleys have been deforested and covered with galvanized roofing.

The truth is that we have been lucky so far. The rains which we so welcomed in May might be cursed in December.

Or we can p r e p a r e our drains to cope with what is to come? T h e choice is ours.