By Francis Quamina Farrier

THERE are some lessons which we learnt either at home or at school, since our pre-teen years which we always remember. One such story which I clearly remember from my pre-teen school days is the story of “The Little Dutch Boy”. That memorable story, many of us of the colonial era read in one of our school books during our very early formal education. It is a story which is still appropriate in Independent Guyana and has not become obsolete from the colonial days.

The story of the little Dutch boy is as follows: One day the little fellow went missing from his home in Holland and as night time fell, his parents and neighbours became very worried. So they went out and searched for him. He was found on the seawalls with his little finger stuck into it. When asked what he was doing with his little finger stuck into the wall, he explained that he saw a hole in that wall through which water was leaking into the lowland and he was afraid that if he did not plug it with his finger right away, the hole would become larger and flood the land.

At school, Ms Edwards, our teacher, drilled it into the heads of her young pupils the importance of the country’s river and sea defences. She also drilled the following into our ears; “The coastlands of Guiana, are below sea level, at high tide”. That is a three-part statement. Unfortunately, many Guyanese often reduce it to, “Guyana is below sea level”, which is so inaccurate. At home in McDoom Village on the East Bank Demerara, my parents also taught me the importance of knowing about the value of the country’s drainage system, including the kokers and their importance to our daily existence, living on the low lying coastlands of Guyana. There was that much smaller canal behind our home known as the “four foot”, which led into the larger koker canal, which took the excess rainwater into the Demerara River. So for us, it was very important to know what was expected of us as regards the drainage of our surroundings.

The Meadow Bank koker, the Ruimveldt koker, the Sussex Street koker and the Princes Street koker were all very well known to me, as well as the important functions of those vital pieces of the drainage system in British Guiana. There is no difference with the need for kokers in independent Guyana and more so with the increasing climate change of the past two decades and the increasingly heavy rainfall. We can recall the Great Flood of 2005 which resulted in extended areas of Guyana’s coastlands inundated and the great misery and loss of property and livestock.

Ten years later, there was the massive 2015 clean-up campaign of the city of Georgetown after over two decades of neglect, during which the city drainage system deteriorated to a situation as never before. After that 2015 clean-up campaign, many youths for the first time in their lives saw the concrete in many drains which they thought were mud drains. The concrete in those city drains was also exposed to sunlight for the first time in over 20 years. There was a noticeable and welcome reduction of floods in Georgetown immediately after that 2015 clean-up campaign. However, there are now still some areas of the city which experience flooding after rainfall. One example is the area in downtown Georgetown, west of the Avenue of the Republic.

As a Koker observer for almost 70 years, I did checks, not only of the kokers and their functioning after the big 2015 clean-up campaign but I also paid close attention to the koker outfalls; that portion of the canal which is between the koker and the river or sea. What I realise is that many of the outfalls are in need of desilting. The worst of them is the outfall of the koker at the northern side of the John Fernandes Ltd. wharf in Georgetown, in which there are large trees growing in that out-fall, impeding about 70 per cent of the water from getting out into the Demerara River when the koker is open. I stood there on numerous occasions observing the water struggling to get past those tree roots and built-up silt and into the Demerara River. I have recorded video footage as well as photographs of that situation.

Christmas 2018 is five months away and I am of the view that there will be a massive desilting project of all the koker out-falls in Georgetown and other areas of the coastlands, so that there will be little or no flooding at the end of the year and beyond. My feeling is that the Avenue of the Republic canal which goes pass the crumbling City Hall will also be desilted before Christmas 2018.

While the patriotic little Dutch Boy of over a century ago was moved to plug a leak in the seawall in his native Holland with his little finger to prevent a flood, here in Guyana of the 21st century, there are those patriotic Guyanese with the power, responsibility and determination to rid the coastlands of floods. They will take, not just their little finger, but heavy-duty equipment and desilt the koker out-falls, in order to prevent the current floods we are experiencing. Like the little Dutch Boy, they will go above and beyond the call of duty to prevent future floods.