And councillor Willoughby was brought into harness yesterday when the Ministry of Workers toured the 21 million dollar Municipal Drainage project. The City Council will inherit the project and Willoughby sits on the Committee. The engineers met their greatest challenge in trying to regularize drainage in the swampland communities in Belama phases 3 and 4. We had a look yesterday:…

Jose Divas - Technical Specialist, Flood Mitigation

"It's very challenging; you can't imagine it is very difficult. It is difficult in the design stage and it is even worse at the execution, the implementation stage."

That's the reality for engineers and work crews trying to bill drainage on the very low lying Delcia Goff Street in Belama Phase 3."

Jose Divas - Technical Specialist, Flood Mitigation

"Well initially what was here was one small 10 foot patch of road leading all the way to the canal. We will be expanding that to almost 24 feet wide road with 5 foot drains and 5 foot sidewalks on both sides."

That means battling against a water table that's right there and structural failures are not uncommon - just look at this leaning house

Jules Vasquez

"How challenging is this component of the project being that A. you're really working in raw swamp and B. this area has no infrastructure, it just popped up, it was just forced into being?"

Jose Divas - Technical Specialist, Flood Mitigation

"It is very challenging, we have to be working in swamp water and it has its smell of course and then the infrastructure we put down has to be significant to ensure that we don't have any structural failure."

It's not so difficult on Albert Hoy Street where the five foot drains abut a newly – if poorly paved street:

Jose Divas - Technical Specialist, Flood Mitigation

"We need to ensure that the Belama area if you notice the whole Albert Hoy runs along the whole Belama area so we need to ensure that all the area is drained and this drain will accomplish this task."

But drainage, lest we forget, will only lessen flooding runoff times, it will not eliminate it:

Jose Divas - Technical Specialist, Flood Mitigation

"Flooding we cannot stop due to the amount of rain fall and the low lying areas but we will mitigate, it will reduce the retention time. So when there was water and it stayed for weeks, we hope to accomplish a time reduction to probably just a few hours.

Perhaps the biggest component in this drainage network is the Mejia Canal which runs from Link Road out to the sea. It is the vena cava, the main vein for drainage in Phases 3 and 4. It is ten feet wide by five feet deep runs for nearly one thousand meters cost almost 2 million dollars by itself.

Rolando Chan - Project Manager, Flood Mitigation

"This is one of the most important canal along with Bill Lindo canal because we have existing canals also but we connect and the water flows directly to the sea, so it's really important."