Whilst the weath­er is un­pre­dictable, most peo­ple know that heavy rains bring flood­ing in the usu­al flood-prone ar­eas. In the past, the Min­is­ter of Works blamed cli­mate change for the ma­jor flood­ing events in down­town Port-of-Spain. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, this has been hap­pen­ing for many years when­ev­er there is heavy rain. There­fore, the flood­ing is­sue can­not be due sole­ly to cli­mate change.

Sim­i­lar­ly, the Mor­vant Barataria Round­about Up­grade project was iden­ti­fied as a crit­i­cal re­lief mea­sure to re­duce traf­fic con­ges­tion and flood­ing in Mor­vant, Laven­tille, Barataria, and en­vi­rons. This project was com­plet­ed in 2022. The up­grade failed to pre­vent the flood­ing which in­un­dat­ed the Barataria round­about and brought traf­fic to a stand­still last Mon­day. Cli­mate change and chang­ing weath­er pat­terns are not go­ing away. The cur­rent pro­jec­tions sug­gest that few coun­tries will meet their cli­mate change com­mit­ments. This im­plies that nor­mal in­fra­struc­ture main­te­nance will be in­suf­fi­cient, re­quir­ing more rig­or­ous in­fra­struc­ture in­ter­ven­tions.

Sim­i­lar­ly, the world had to ad­just to the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic four years ago. Again, the pre­dic­tions are that we will see an­oth­er pan­dem­ic even if its ori­gins are dif­fer­ent. Of­fi­cial da­ta sug­gests that the cur­rent out­break of dengue fever is man­age­able, though anec­do­tal ev­i­dence in­di­cates that the in­fec­tion rate is much high­er than the of­fi­cial sta­tis­tics. Whilst we ap­pre­ci­ate that cit­i­zens need to be more vig­i­lant and self-aware, cit­i­zens are not sole­ly to blame.

Last Tues­day, the Min­is­ter of Health not­ed that the num­ber of no­tices to home­own­ers to clean up their premis­es had risen from 31 to 441 in less than a month. It is more prob­a­ble that the in­crease in no­tices is­sued re­sults from greater sur­veil­lance rather than a de­cline in house­keep­ing stan­dards. The min­is­ter has sug­gest­ed that the In­sect Vec­tor Con­trol Di­vi­sion is do­ing its part by com­plet­ing 160,000 home vis­its sup­port­ed by a pro­gramme of strate­gic spray­ing. So why is the num­ber of cas­es ris­ing if the out­break is lim­it­ed to spe­cif­ic ge­o­graph­i­cal lo­ca­tions?

Per­haps the changed weath­er pat­tern and in­creased rain­fall are bless­ings. It is re­plen­ish­ing the ground­wa­ter sup­plies and fill­ing the reser­voirs. The wet con­di­tions al­so re­duce the risk of fires. This has the ben­e­fi­cial im­pact of pre­vent­ing the loss of life and prop­er­ty, as Fire Ser­vices As­so­ci­a­tion (Sec­ond Di­vi­sion) pres­i­dent Keone Guy is re­port­ing that fire sta­tions lack func­tion­al ap­pli­ances to re­spond to fires na­tion­wide. He al­so says this sit­u­a­tion is com­pound­ed by a short­age of emer­gency equip­ment, in­clud­ing per­son­al pro­tec­tive equip­ment.

Al­so, news­pa­per re­ports in­di­cate that TTUTA wrote to the CPO ask­ing for his help to speed up in­sur­ance re­funds due to mem­bers. The re­funds are es­ti­mat­ed at $33 mil­lion and are said to be tak­ing up to 13 months ver­sus the ex­pect­ed four to six weeks. The in­sur­ance plan is a con­di­tion of ser­vice and forms part of the union agree­ment. The Gov­ern­ment, as em­ploy­er, con­tributes 60 per cent of the plan and teach­ers 40 per cent.

TTUTA forms part of the man­age­ment com­mit­tee of the plan but has not been shown re­sults of an au­dit com­mis­sioned by the Fi­nance Min­istry and car­ried out by min­istry of­fi­cials. The plan is in deficit. Why is the plan in deficit? Has the Fi­nance Min­istry been pay­ing its con­tri­bu­tions? Or is the plan in the same po­si­tion as those wait­ing on VAT re­funds?

What­ev­er the rea­son, it ap­pears that the rainy sea­son, gua­va sea­son and elec­tion sea­son have co­in­cid­ed.