Heed advice of emergency authorities

“We often advise people if you are concerned about your safety, you may want to vacate and go to a safer area, but invariably people do not do that. What people do is that they stay in their homes and wait to see the extent of flooding.” Williams encouraged citizens to take a more proactive approach to ensuring their personal safety by leaving their homes and seeking shelter elsewhere until flooding subsides.

He said that emergency response services usually only respond to affected areas once flood water has drained which could take hours before persons left behind in these areas receive assistance.

“The response agencies usually wait until the water recedes before we come to these affected areas to assess the damage, so it’s only when those flood waters have receded we tend to get a sense of the level of impact.” He added that while heavy showers were expected to occur during the weekend into today, no flash flooding has been reported so far but urged persons who may have been affected by recent flooding to learn from past experiences and secure their homes before major flooding occurs.

“Flood happens every year so this a fairly routine occurrence, what people should be doing is learning from their past experiences, but what people tend to do is wait and see and only after the flooding has come they choose to act.”