Flooding is the negligence of man

THE EDITOR: I wish to inform fellow writer, Mc Donald James (Newsday September 15, page 15) that very few Indians came to Trinidad after indentureship ended in 1917. However, Indian settlements (barracks) were established pre-1917 by the colonial sugar plantocracy on the banks of the Caroni River and on the Caroni Plain to house my Indian pitris (ancestors) - not by the Indian indentures themselves. Housing on river banks/ flood plains started at the dawn of civilisation. It continues today unabated. Valsayn Park is a flood plain settlement. Rain is an act of God. Flooding results from the culpable negligence of the State. 

The State can and must bring an end to flooding of homes and farming caused directly by the Caroni River because its channel is silted up from hillside quarrying, slash and burn and housing, collapse of the banks and it is overgrown with trees. Accordingly the channel has progressively narrowed (river atherosclerosis). At present it is unable to hold the normal water volume. Floods result. Flooding caused by the Caroni River can and will be eliminated by the proposed cleaning/ dredging of the channel to its mouth, removal of major meanders and building of the reinforced embankments on the settlement bank.

Mr James have you seen the expanding island developing at the confluence of the Caroni-St Joseph Rivers? Minister Khan acting on caring and sustained Prime Ministerial intervention and now driven by the necessary political will to do so, can and will eliminate the major floods caused by the Caroni River in Kelly, St Helena, Caroni, Warrenville and other villages miles away. The victims of flooding, which is respecter neither of geography nor of ethnicity, can do without James’ uninformed pessimism.

STEPHEN  KANGAL
Caroni