Tue Jan 21, 2013
by Oswald Fereira
It was with great sadness that we heard of the severe flooding that Vincentians experienced last Christmas Eve night. Natural disasters of this extreme are difficult at any time, but it must have been particularly difficult when all plans for the festive season, after weeks of preparation, were dashed and many families were left to cope with the loss of loved ones. My sympathy goes out to all those so affected, those left homeless and those left to mourn the dead.{{more}}
We appear to be in a very wet cycle with floods all around the globe. I remember as a child growing up in Park Hill there were regular floods and landslides, sometimes so severe that even with traffic diversions, it was not possible to get to school in Kingstown on time. The Colonarie river often flowed over the Three Rivers bridge. But that is the nature of weather and climate; it goes in cycles where floods are followed by droughts and then floods again.
I can just picture the devastation at Pasture in South Rivers where homes were flooded out. But, anyone who grew up in South Rivers knows that Pasture is an old river bed that was prone to constant flooding. It was a place to tether cows and goats, hence the name – “Pasture.â In the dry years, we could have been fooled that it was a safe place to live, but now that we appear to be in a wetter cycle the flooding has returned. I started primary school in South Rivers and I remember Pasture well. It was an old ball ground (cricket) interspersed with wild guava trees which we as school children visited constantly to reap the fruits. On one side is the Colonarie river and on the other side the Cane Hole and Questelles Piece gutters join before flowing on the other side of Pasture then joining the Colonarie river. So, Pasture is almost surrounded by water and not only was the Colonarie River a threat, but I have seen the combined Cane Hole and Questelles Piece gutters flood Pasture. Given the substantial homes that have been built there, it will be a most expensive task to relocate the community and I am not convinced that relocation will solve the issue, as once that land is vacated, people will move in again and build more homes. Perhaps the solution could be earthen berms to shore up the river and stream banks to keep the flood waters at bay and limit the damage in future.
How do we ameliorate the effects of rain?
Then came bananas, and farmers were encouraged to keep the banana fields free of grass, so no more ground cover.
The farmers filled in the contour drains and removed the rows of grass to get that extra row of bananas and the large banana leaves collected and concentrated the rain water and poured in on the bare ground below. Rain water now flowed freely over open ground from the top of the hill to the rivers and streams below, with nothing to break the speed or to slow the flow. The result is that our topsoil now sits in the bottom of the sea and our soils are poorer and it is more difficult to grow and maintain a ground cover. The deep holes in our rivers are all silted up and the flooding problems are now magnified. Repetition of these flood cycles will leave our hillsides in scrub and the end result could be desertification, where our hillsides become barren.
I visited SVG in 1995 and I went to the Colonarie river to see the many pools in which I swam as a child. I was so disappointed, as they were all silted in. The pool at Number Fourteen, above South Rivers, used to cover my head; it barely reached up to my waist. That was one pool; imagine the cumulative effect of all the lost water storage in the many other pools along the river. And I saw so much garbage strewn in the river. When people cooked at the riverside, they just threw the refuse into the river, leaving it strewn with breadfruit, plantain, bananas and ground provision peelings and sadly the river appeared to not have the force to wash them away. So, the damage had been accumulating over several years.
If we remove our forests, we destroy our watersheds
Safeguarding against future flooding