Stormwater issues become Cayman’s latest crisis

(CNS): The long-term and obvious neglect by past and present politicians, civil servants and board appointees of stormwater management appears to be no closer to being resolved than it was in the wake of Hurricane Ivan some two decades ago. As Cayman prepares for more days of heavy rain and subsequent flooding, former premier Wayne Panton has revealed the “resistance” he encountered in the backrooms of government when he tried to coordinate a national plan to tackle the problem.

Most residential areas in Cayman have been built on land just a few feet above sea level. However, the problem of flooding is now approaching crisis level due to the extent of development and the loss of natural habitats that once absorbed excess water, leaving it with nowhere to go.

The problem has been compounded by the requirement for all developments to fill land to higher levels, ensuring that older neighbouring properties are flooded.

Cayman’s climate is changing as the planet warms, which affects global rain patterns. This will likely result in fewer but more intense periods of rain here, while increasing king tides and sea level rise make matters worse.

The Department of Environment has been advising for years that a national stormwater management plan is desperately needed. Local activists, such as Sustainable Cayman, have noted the need to tackle specific areas, such as the South Sound basin, where the significant loss of mangroves to pave the way for private development has fuelled the constant flooding in that area.

Panton told CNS that the planning department and the Central Planning Authority don’t accept they have responsibility for stormwater management or drainage issues when considering planning applications. They see it as a ‘roads problem’, even though the development of land in general, not just roads, has fuelled this serious problem.

However, the government has no real plan for how it is going to manage the increasing problem of flooding, and no amount of free government-supplied sandbags is going to resolve this.

Every time land is cleared of natural habitat, especially wetland areas that have been destroyed and filled against the best advice from the DoE, Cayman loses land that absorbs water, replaced by non-permeable concrete surfaces where water collects, spills over and floods.

Panton said that in the absence of a national plan, the CPA is in a position to help in the first instance by imposing conditions on development or refusing projects that will exacerbate flooding in the communities surrounding an intended project. A policy direction could also ensure that the potential for a new development to flood existing neighbouring properties would be just cause to refuse an application.

“The CPA has wide discretion and already has the power to attach conditions to any application,” he told CNS on Tuesday, as he raised concerns that during his time as premier, his efforts to coordinate a national stormwater management system were met with not just resistance but hostility.

Panton added that he met with “resistance to any type of forward-thinking” and the problem of flooding in the broader sense “was just being ignored”. Furthermore, he said there was no indication that PlanCayman, the long-awaited new national development plan, would address the problems of flooding and stormwater management.

He said there is no sitting stormwater management committee, and despite assurances from Planning Minister Jay Ebanks that work was being done to address flooding, he saw no evidence of any coordinated effort by planning to work with the DoE, the National Roads Authority or the Water Authority to address the issue.

Ebanks told local environmental activists almost three years ago that the government was working on a storm-water management plan. However, speaking on Radio Cayman’s talk show, For the Record, last week, he said his ministry was only now looking at forming a task force to handle this latest crisis.

The minister admitted that the current pumping efforts were a temporary fix, and he was hoping to “put together a working group with the National Roads Authority, Department of Environment and others to come up with a national plan”.

Making no mention of the significant role that the CPA plays in this problem or its existing discretion powers, the minister said changes to planning legislation could be required to compel developers who are building on traditional floodplains to provide drainage solutions beyond the boundaries of their property.

However, this would do nothing to change the piecemeal approach, where each developer is left to install their own drainage system, which is wholly inadequate to avoid the developing crisis. It is now clear that the government is a very long way from implementing a full national plan based on data and science, which would have a real impact.