By Anne Hilton Thursday, July 29 2010

The best part of a quarter century ago, and in Another Place I wrote an article headlined “Is Trinidad Drowning?” That article was inspired by a well advertised TV programme of the same name made by a Canadian television producer, based on research by a Trinidad-born-and-bred Professor in a University in Montreal.

It appears that in the course of a visit to his native land, the Professor spent a week, maybe more, in Icacos with a TV camera crew filming the spectacular erosion in and around Los Iros Bay. Viewers unfamiliar with that corner of Trinidad gasped in awe and amazement at pictures of wrecked groynes built to hold back the sea that, together with photographs of uprooted coconut trees strewing the (if memory serve) beach at Mayaro seemed to prove the Trini-Canadian Professor’s point that sea level rise had come, with a vengeance, to Trinidad and Tobago.

Some viewers (fortunately not too many) panicked, thinking their last hour had come, that the sea was about to overwhelm the island. Others, reckoning God to be a Trini, weren’t worried and forgot all about the documentary so that when shiny new Cabinet Ministers visited the site a week or so ago, there was talk of erecting barriers to hold back the sea.

Let us hope it is no more than talk — and soon forgotten — because …

Sea defences, as I wrote in 1996, cost vast sums of money — and with the best will in the world (and unlimited financial resources) can’t be built in a year or two. It took the Dutch, the world experts in flood and sea defences, the best part of 30 or more years and billions of guilders and/or Euros to build the Deltawerk, the awesome sea defences bridging the deltas of the Rhine and the Meuse.

Way back in 1996 while watching the TV programme Is Trinidad Drowning? I remembered thumbing through a booklet prepared by the Institute of Marine Affairs (IMA) in which I’d noted those wrecked groynes had been constructed in 1975 — and that coastal erosion in those parts was not new, that it had been going on since Columbus first sighted the Trinity Hills thus giving this island a new and Christian name.

Rather than make a fool of myself in public, I called Professor Julian Kenny who confirmed my recollection that coastal erosion in that area was nothing new, that it had been going on for centuries, that it had nothing to do with sea level rise. He told me strong currents in the Gulf of Paria have been eroding the coastline for as long as anyone can remember; furthermore, the water eating into the land in Los Iros Bay actually transport the sand, picking it up and carrying it to Icacos where it drops its load.