Dillon: Flooding measures taken in Greenvale

HOUSING Minister Edmund Dillon yesterday said measures had been taken to prevent a repeat of the devastating floods which occurred in Greenvale last year.

Speaking to reporters after the handover of Tower A of the Mahogany Court in Mt Hope, Dillon said, “During the last year, we have done some mitigation works at Greenvale.”

He said that included widening roads and work on pumps, and the Works and Transport Ministry also did external work in the area. He was confident those measures would work.

Dillon also said extra precautions had been taken in the selection of land used for public-private partnership housing projects with respect to flooding, and land which could be flood-prone and deemed not suitable for housing had been rejected.

He rejected the notion that high-density housing necessarily led to high delinquency and crime by its occupants, saying it was the people who defined the spaces they lived in. He said there were studies that showed such housing promoted strong communities.

In addition, he said, the green-space initiative which the Housing Development Corporation (HDC) was undertaking at its various projects was designed to create ready-made gardens to foster community bonding and change the “concrete” image of the projects.