Many engineers, but no flood solutions

THE EDITOR: One of my many childhood memories was having to remove my sneakers and wade across the flooded street to exit the then train station, now City Gate.

The train system has long been scrapped and forgotten. The train stopped running about a year and a half into my high-school experience.

Fast forward to 2024 and, miraculously, the floods are still with us; even the water looks the same.

For decades we have seen South Quay, particularly from City Gate to the HDC offices, flood with the slightest drizzle. And for decades the authorities, collectively, throw their hands in the air as if this problem cannot be resolved.

As irony would have it, the sea is mere metres away.

The flooding taking place at the bottom of Richmond Street, where it meets at Independence Square, now provides some competition with City Gate. Fortunately, there is not as much pedestrian traffic for it to qualify as a significant challenge. That spot, too, is mere metres from the sea.

Meanwhile, the UWI St Augustine Campus has an entire Faculty of Engineering which has been churning out engineers each year for decades. Many of the engineering students would have been beneficiaries of the City Gate flood experience. Yet the flooding persists.

Sir Ken Robinson, in one of his many TED talks, said, and I paraphrase, "If all the apples in the barrel are bad, then perhaps it’s time to take a closer look at the barrel maker." After all, the UWI has been producing not only engineers, but economists criminologists, geologists, lawyers, technocrats, bureaucrats…

The idea that a society can boast of so many post-graduate diplomas and degrees yet have as many problems and issues as we do requires open, objective, honest discussions.

Standing in the pathway to such is the concern that many of the people who should form part of the discussions are products of the same tainted barrel.

And since many people swear allegiances to their respective alma maters, I suspect that getting an objective discussion would be near impossible. After all, disciplines tend to close ranks to outsiders.

From my early days at the university I learned from medical students that no one dies on the operating table. When a patient dies, it is always in “recovery.” The operation was always “a success.”

The question becomes: how do we explain, in today’s world, the complete inability to deal with a simple downpour? How do we explain a road flooding next to a beach, as in the Manzanilla-Mayaro Road, or next to the sea as what exists at City Gate or at Richmond Street and Independence Square?

After lengthy discussions, I find myself leaning towards the thinking of a close friend, who suggested that perhaps the UWI is just another degree mill, churning out paper tigers instead of teaching students how to think and solve real-world problems.

RUDY PAUL

via e-mail