Ishmael: Littering raises flood risk during hurricane season

Minister of State in the Ministry of Health and Wellness, Davidson Ishmael has warned Barbadians that indiscriminate littering and illegal dumping increase the risk of flooding during the hurricane season.

Ahead of the June 1 start to the season, Government ministries, departments and agencies met to conduct their annual hurricane preparedness exercises.

Ishmael noted that this was done “well in advance of hurricane season’s commencement”.

He appealed to residents to be more conscious of their surroundings and to take greater responsibility for keeping their environments clean.

“The illegal dumping, the littering. I’m still as a citizen of this country, very concerned about the indiscriminate littering that I see. I see people driving and throwing things out through the window. I saw somebody outside their home, right outside their own home, in the gallery just dropping a wrapper from something that they were eating, just dropping it on the ground in front of the house.

“Now, when a person does these things or when people engage in this type of behavior, that debris doesn’t stay there, it blows, it goes into a drain, and then you have flooding,” Ishmael lamented.

He said that even relatively minor weather systems can result in flooding when drains become blocked by litter and other debris.

“Let’s say the rain falls because of some weather system that is passing us; it may not be a very serious weather system, but it brings a lot of rainfall with it. Then you have drains that are blocked by the accumulation of these wrappers, the plastic, etc, the bags and then what should be an easy runoff of water or rain then becomes flooding that affects people’s ability to traverse in and out of their homes or even causes damage to people’s properties, whether it is cars or vehicles or whether it is homes,” Ishmael explained.

The minister highlighted a number of preventative measures available throughout the year to help reduce the accumulation of waste in communities.

One such initiative is government’s bulk clean-up service.

“If a person has, or maybe even a community has a lot of bulk waste or what we call bulky waste; that could be beds, that could be old appliances, those are things that they can coordinate with the SSA [Sanitation Service Authority] team to have a day when all those things are pulled into an area and then we would just come in with the relevant equipment and we would move that bulky waste on their behalf,” Ishmael said.

Additionally, government is offering a commercial skip rental service through the SSA.

“You can rent a skip from the SSA and if you have a community where there’s a need for a cleanup to be done, they can easily use the skip and fill it, and then the SSA would come and take the skip at the end of that cleanup exercise,” he added.

Ishmael also underscored the important role played by the SSA in the aftermath of storms and hurricanes.

“When there’s debris and waste that is accumulated post, let’s say a storm or a hurricane, the SSA is pressed into action to be able to clean up the area,” he said.

He also stressed the importance of securing items that could become airborne during severe weather.

“If you have galvanise, you want to make sure that you can nail that in and secure that as much as possible. This is the galvanise not only in terms of palings around people’s homes, but we also know that people use galvanize even for dog houses and different things like that and sheds, so you want to make sure that all of that is quite secure,” Ishmael said.

“You want to make sure that there is no loose wood and all sorts of things that are just knocking around the house, so you want to secure those things or get rid of them as early as possible.”

(LG)