Forty feet canal need a name change
(Kaieteur News) – Dennis Chabrol has published photographs of the Cummings Canal, popularly known as the Forty Feet Trench. And dem boys had to stop and look twice, because dem boys remember when that trench was a different story altogether.
When dem boys was small, dem used to swim in that trench. But if yuh parents ever find out, yuh was sure to get licks. Dem parents know the water was black, the trench was extremely deep, and nobody could see what was lurking beneath. It was one of them places where yuh jump in as a boy and pray that yuh come up as a man.
Dem boys remember that yuh could stand up in that trench and still couldn’t touch bottom. It was so deep that even a good swimmer had to respect it. But judging from the photographs published by Chabrol, things have changed considerably.
The Forty Feet Trench has apparently dried out and become so heavily sedimented that at its deepest point, yuh could kneel down and still keep yuh head above water.
The Forty Feet Trench is now looking more like a forty-feet puddle. Even a duck might have to think twice before diving in.
And therein lies part of Guyana’s flooding problem. These canals and drainage channels were constructed to carry away enormous volumes of water. But when dem become filled with silt, and suffering from years of neglect, they lose their capacity to do the very job for which they were built.
Then when heavy rainfall comes, the water has nowhere to go. It does what water always does: it finds somebody’s yard, living room or kitchen.
The authorities need to stop admiring drainage plans on paper and start looking at the trenches on the ground.
And since the Forty Feet Trench has clearly lost its depth, dem boys feel it deserves a name change. From now on, it should be called the Four-Inch Trench. That would be more honest.
Because at the rate things going, the only thing that going to be deep about that trench is the flooding in people’s homes. Dem boys seh, a country can’t drain properly when its forty-feet trench can’t even hold forty inches of water!
Talk half. Leff half.
Source: Kaieteur News
