Last night we told you about the Tropical Disturbance which would bring two to four inches of rain. Up to this evening, three inches had fallen at the Phillip Goldson Airport in Ladyville and 4.2 inches had fallen at the Coast Guard Base at mile three. That's why here in the city, it felt like a water world, as rain fell through the night into morning.
For the City Council and the MIDH that meant a chance to test the Yabra Pumping Station. When we went there around 10:00, it was hard at work in all its hydraulic glory - lifting water from the canals and dumping it into the Caribbean Sea..
I stopped by today and spoke to the mayor and one of the engineers:
The rains cancelled classes and forced students to tramp home through flooded streets.
The non stop downpour resulting from the Tropical Disturbance
resulted once again in flooded streets across the city. And once the drains and canals begin to overflow on the South side, the city council activates the Pumping Station. They leave it up to these screw turbines to pump the water out of the cans and speed up the draining process.
Bernard Wagner, Belize City Mayor
"Yeah obviously as you can see here the 4 screws are working efficiently. Really putting out like one cubic meter per screw so you are looking at 4 cubic meter per second of water being pulled. Right now as we sit based on the engineers discussions I've had with them this is just taking off the top of the water currently. We have not locked off the gates as yet because water is being pushed out in its natural form in different areas of the city. But as soon as we begin to generate more of the pull from these screws then those gates will be locked and it will begin to pull totally from the inner part of the city yeah."
"All the areas within these two canals and the outer layers of them obviously, Orange Street, King Street, Dean Street. South street and all the other adjacent streets in the are should see a sort of leveling off of the water pretty quickly."
Aside from the water, the large amounts of garbage and debris is also a problem when there is flooding. Assistant Engineer at the Belize City Council says they also have mechanisms to filter out the garbage while pumping out the water.
Ramon Menjivar, Assistant City Engineer, CITCO
"The system allows for us to activate the pumps and get the water much faster not necessarily much faster than what is dropping because you have to compare the amount of landfall dropping on a land mass as compared to the facility of the pumping action."
"Whenever we have flooding we have littering which is a general thing and we need to advocate to the residents and the general public that littering contributes to that. Of course we have our sanitation department that we clean daily we bring our equipment and we remove we have a barrier containment just before the bridge which the garbage or the litter is contained and we remove it on a daily basis but that is an issue that we are advocating very much because it prohibits the water from flowing out as we would want to."
It's not a "in the blink of an eye" process and as the rains are expected to continue into the weekend, the mayor says there is no telling when the streets will be completely dry. He is confident though they have a strong system in place and the pumps will prevail in flood prone areas after the rains have fallen
Bernard Wagner, Belize City Mayor
"I came on Fairweather streets just a while ago and Fairweather Street Rivero street have significant flooding. By cemetery road and the pound yard bridge have significant flooding so this will begin to pull that water immediately form the cemetery road, pound yard bridge area because this is a direct canal linked to that area so we should see barring the rain and we expect more rains to continue throughout the day and throughout the night but to the best of my knowledge and to the best of my engineers this system will work and we will see because it's always good to test these systems and so why we never want flooding it's always good to have these testing environments."
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