The law and public nuisance?

It is against the law in our country to take water from any stream, river pond or well without obtaining a licence from WASA. It is against the law to change the course, or divert, or widen any river or stream without requisite permission. And it is against the law to dam or impede the flow of any river, stream or watercourse without written permission.

If you own land on a hillside, and you deforest that land, excavate or bulldoze the land to the detriment of persons owning land above or below you, you will be liable for damages which may occur as a result of what you did to your land. This last applies to private landholdings only, and the private landowners must take the matter to the courts on their own.

However, if persons conduct activities on their land, and these activities damage or destroy State Lands, roads or lives, nothing will be done to seek recompense or justice from the perpetrator. We saw this when a Forest Ranger was burned to death in St Ann’s, after a resident “cleaned” his land with an illegal fire which, every year, “gets away” from the perpetrator.

We see this along the Arima Blanchisseuse Road, where a christophene farmer illegally cut away all of the forest to plant his crops, and this denudation has caused several major landslips along about a mile of the steep hillside road. Government continues to spend millions of dollars for retaining walls through the christophene. There can be no doubt in the mind of any civil engineer in Trinidad that the removal of the forest is the cause of the landslips. But successive governments remain impotent and powerless to either stop people from creating these hazards, or to prosecute them when they blatantly break the law.

A few days ago residents of a community in the Mayaro area saw their properties and their homes flooded with filthy rushing water. They were not in a flood prone area, no river overflowed there in the past, so how could they suddenly have their lives jolted and their properties damaged by a flash flood? They went in search of the cause, upstream along the rushing water. They discovered a large earthen dam, which when filled with water from the heavy rains, collapsed and sent hundreds of thousands of gallons of water rushing through their homes.

Clearly the dam had been “built” without any regard for its own integrity, without any calculations as to its ability to retain that (or any?) amount of water, without any concrete or steel pipe overflows to allow gathered water to spill over and disperse slowly. And clearly the dam had been built, and the watercourse blocked, without any permission from any State agency, not Town & Country Planning Division, not Local Government, nor WASA, nor the EMA, nor anyone.

In the aftermath the media visited, filmed and reported on the shock, the damage, and the trauma suffered by those who suffered losses and considerable personal stress. Government officials of various ranks and “authorities” visited and commiserated with the victims.

Help will come from government to clean up the mess in their homes, and government will provide counselling for the mess in their lives.

And after a while, when all has been cleared and cleaned, and new appliances and school books purchased, the community will return to normal, and everyone will live happily ever after.

Including the perpetrator? Apparently, yes! You see, this disaster to the community must obviously be one of those “Acks of Gord” that regularly come from Heaven to disrupt our lives. And quite clearly, neither any arm of government, nor any arm of the media is interested in asking, far less knowing, who is responsible for this. Who owns the land upon which the dam (it may be dams, I am told) was built? Whose bulldozers went in there to clear the land and build the large earthen dam which was always doomed to collapse? I can understand various government people not pursuing this, and that would be because they already know.

And maybe the perpetrator is important enough to grab their genitals? But am I to accept that the media cannot ask who owns the land and who built the dam? In this land, people who create public nuisance live very protected lives.