...hell and high water

We are in the most dangerous part of the tropical storm season.  Earlier in the year, we could watch the tropical waves leave Africa and take their time – generally about a week – to develop into storms as they crossed the Atlantic.  From September on, these storms can develop almost anywhere, and a lot of them pop up in our own back yard.

The late-season storms that rise off the coast of South America or in the Gulf and Caribbean basins don’t have the defined shapes, smooth tracks and large size of the earlier Cape Verde storms.  They are raggedy little systems that are hard to track, because they develop quickly and there’s a lot of land and contrary winds in their way.  They bounce around like dum-dum bullets, leaving death and destruction wherever they touch.

A lot of the death and destruction comes from heavy rains.  As we learned in late September, when Tropical Storm Nicole trailed her soggy skirts across Jamaica, wind will mess you up but water can kill you.

There are a few things you can do to be safer. First, check your surroundings.  High risk areas include the banks of rivers, streams and gullies, and the low-lying areas where water from surrounding hillsides drains into a river, a gully or a roadway.

Second, do what you can to lower your risk.  Make sure any ditches, drains, culverts and gullies near you are kept clear of trash, brush and tree branches, so water can flow freely.  If you can, use rock walls and ditches to steer water away from your house.

Third, pay attention to weather reports and flood warnings.  The Meteorological Service and ODPEM issue these warnings – broadcast on radio and TV and published in newspapers – to give people who may be at risk a chance to prepare, and to move to safer places if they need to.  If a warning is issued for your area, head for higher ground and stay there until the situation improves.

Fourth, use common sense.  Keep yourself, your children and your animals away from fast-flowing water.  Just six inches of fast-moving water can sweep you off your feet.  Don’t drive on a flooded road.  Most cars can be swept away by less than two feet of flowing water, and you won’t be able to see if the road ahead of you is caved in or washed out until it’s too late.

Bad luck put us in the path of Nicole, but bad management caused a lot of the misery.  Roads were planned and built during the two-year “long dry” with (it seems) no thought about where heavy runoff would go.  As a result, hillside communities on the western edge of Montego Bay were cut off, some for several days, and many of them had their own flooding problems.  Retaining walls were built with no low-level drainage, so they collapsed from the weight of the over-soaked soil behind them.  Hillsides scraped bare for logging, quarrying or development slid into the valleys below, choking roads and yards with debris.

As we went to press, national flash flood warnings had expired, but there will be more.  Better land use planning, that looks at whole watersheds from mountain top to sea floor and corrects some past mistakes, is the only way to keep deadly floods and landslides from being annual events.