Dear Editor,
I couldn’t help commenting on the article ‘Mayor promises solutions to flooding at Camp and New Market streets.’ The murky waters that engulfed the Camp and New Market Streets intersection last week carried more than urban runoff—they bore the weight of decades of broken political promises. As Mayor Alfred Mentore announced “immediate dredging” and an “engineering assessment” from his makeshift sandbag podium, long-time residents recognized the familiar script. This performance has played out in Georgetown for generations, with only the cast changing.
The ghosts of previous administrations seemed to haunt those flooded streets. Hamilton Green’s 1990s appeals for dredging critical canals like Lamaha now sound prophetic, his warnings silenced by the same indifference that allowed silt to reclaim those waterways. Ranwell Jordan’s 2005 pleas for citizens to stop dumping waste echo with bitter irony as plastic debris floated past shuttered businesses—his urgent environmental appeals dissolving like the infrastructure they sought to protect.
Patricia Chase-Green’s mayoralty from 2016 to 2019 provides the most telling precedent. Her documented demands for infrastructure investment—upgraded kokers, modern pumps, enforcement against illegal construction—read today like a blueprint for disaster prevention that was never implemented. The “Georgetown Drainage Master Plan” she championed remains filed away, presumably in some waterproof archive, while the century-old drainage system it was meant to replace continues its slow deterioration beneath our streets.
Ubraj Narine’s 2021 crisis response completed this cycle of reactive governance. His administration’s emergency measures—24/7 koker monitoring and urgent dredging during catastrophic flooding—revealed a harsh truth: decades of neglect cannot be reversed during a crisis. That flooding persists in the same critical areas Narine identified demonstrates how short-term fixes consistently triumph over long-term planning.
Local business owner, Dianne Persaud, standing outside her water-damaged shop, captured the public’s weary resignation: “We know this routine by heart. First come the passionate mayoral promises, then the temporary fixes, then the inevitable return of the floods.” Her neighbour, Robert Khan, remembered Chase-Green making identical commitments about this very intersection in 2017. “They cleaned the drains for the cameras,” he observed, “but the underlying problems remained untouched.”
The current administration’s promises now join the growing archive of deferred solutions. The proposed engineering assessment mirrors Chase-Green’s unfunded master plan. The dredging commitment echoes Green’s and Narine’s battles against ever-accumulating sediment. The anti-dumping campaign recycles Jordan’s frustrated public appeals.
What makes this latest response different? Only the calendar date. The core obstacles remain unchanged: insufficient funding, bureaucratic fragmentation, and the systematic abandonment of preventive maintenance. When floodwaters recede, political urgency evaporates with them. The dredging equipment disappears, the assessments gather dust, and the infrastructure continues to decay.
Georgetown’s residents deserve better than this endless cycle of crisis and neglect. Real flood prevention requires sustained investment, not just emergency responses. It demands long-term planning, not political theater. Most importantly, it needs leaders who understand that yesterday’s solutions cannot solve tomorrow’s problems.
Until this changes, Georgetown will continue witnessing its mayors standing in floodwater, delivering speeches that sound remarkably similar to those given by their predecessors. The real tragedy is not the flooding itself, but our city’s stubborn refusal to learn from its own history.
Keith Bernard