— bottle necks at Mackenzie outfalls blamed for flooding

REGION 10 Chairman, Renis Morian, said the region has received many positive responses from corporate society following an urgent appeal from the Regional Democratic Council (RDC) for assistance to the scores of families whose homes were damaged by a freak storm last Friday.

On Monday, an emergency disaster response meeting will also be convened with all the necessary stakeholders, to see how best the situation can be dealt with for now and in the future. One of the businesses that came forward to assist was Banks DIH.

Meanwhile, regional officials continue to assess the damages in the various communities, particularly Blue Berry Hill. The community’s constituency representative, Councillor Fern McKoy, when contacted, said she is in assessment mode to ascertain the level of the damages and how best the residents can be assisted. According to a release from the RDC, Morian was seeking assistance for 100 16 ft sheets of zinc, 100 food hampers and cleaning detergents for the affected residents.

During the storm on Friday, Central Mackenzie was severely flooded. Streets, including Pine Street and Republic Avenue were completely inundated. Businesses in that central market area were shut off. While the situation returned to normalcy on Saturday, Constituency Representative for Mackenzie, Councillor Leroy James said the underlying issue that caused the flooding every time there is a heavy rainfall is not clogged drains, as was alleged by residents, but the bottlenecks at the four major outfalls in Central Mackenzie.

“We really have a genuine situation; Mackenzie was designed with some main outfalls that empty a lot of the streets. What happens is that overtime, the shoulders of these outfalls were reduced… so the outfalls are not adequate to accommodate any major flow of water, so we’ll always have water backing up,” he said.

He reasoned that it does not matter how many times the drains are cleaned, as long as there is heavy rainfall, the streets will be flooded. While the funding to correct this will be in the millions, James said that all the agencies need to come together to have it done because businesses continue to be affected during the rainy season.

The council is not in a position to handle the project single-handedly, given its cash-strapped state. Meanwhile, the two electricity companies that man the Wismar and Mackenzie shores were able to restore stable electricity to the communities where power poles were uprooted and transformers were damaged in Wismar and Amelia’s Ward.