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.
- Fascinated
- Happy
- Sad
- Angry
- Bored
- Afraid
Category: development, Local News, Policy, Politics, Science & Nature, Weather
Quick, act now, luxury townhouses in West Bay called (The High Point). A day could come that the low-lying areas become redlined for exclusion from lending (like timber framed homes) so you’ll be left with worthless assets that will be the new timber framed homes.
Need some engineers from New Orleans to come and design a flooding mitigation system that has, with the exception of Katrina worked for generations.
Send chefs with seafood along, too.
yawn…..zzzzzzzzz
every year we have a couple of weeks of heavy rain and there is then some flooding to some low-lying areas. same in most jursistictions.
if roads/areas were flooded in normal weather, then that would be a story.
guess you don’t have a need for a bucket by your front door- show some friggin consideration for those less fortunate than you!
Tell me you’re privileged and aren’t originally from Cayman without saying so. You’re the type of person who gives expats a bad name.
This expat cried when they saw the photos and videos of the poorest of our “glamorous destination” soaked and destitute.
These people need a solution to flooding now!
Your response is naive at best and outright heartless at worst. Here’s a quote that fits your response to the tee:
Sometimes People Won’t Understand How you Feel Until It Happens To Them. Until They Experience The Pain.
Reap what you sow – too much concrete and land owners clearing mangroves with no permission and no penalty so everybody knows they can just keep clearing mangroves with no repercussion. Dart being allowed to just do what he wants .. look what he cleared by the Kimpton for the music festival that was only ever going to happen once as a way for him to be allowed to clear that land. My sympathies lie with the Blue Iguanas who, having been successful bred back from extinction by Fred Burton and crew, will now be pushed to the brink once again when the East-West arterial road is built and that area is developed.
As a developer who strives to operate ethically and responsibly, it’s incredibly frustrating to see the lack of accountability and poor planning that continues to put both residents and the environment at risk…
CNS: The rest of this comment can be found here.
Wayne you are the same guy that cast your approval for the road extension through the middle of the central mangrove. I have been residing in the area for 35 years and have not seen flooding such as this. Everything in my yard is waterlogged and dead! I should matter, my property should matter, my peace and tranquillity matters. I am going to vote next year and I will definitely be voting for anyone new and not these clowns who are destroying my country for a few dollars!
Nobody cares! A perfect example of finger pointing and shifting responsibility, instead of working together to address the issue.
Nice and dry in Scotland!
I know Scotland has a lot to do with how bad the roads are…
I see what you did here 😉
LOL. Nice one. Can add health care and football to that list.
Mark your words?
yeah..but its scotland.
if it was 27c and sunny in scotland… the scots would still be miserable.
the Scots are tough and resilient…that’s a lot different to being as you say miserable.
Plus ça change. See these two blog posts from 2005, almost two decades ago…
https://h2g2.com/entry/A4503665
https://h2g2.com/entry/A4503683
Some quotes:
[Expats] come, earn a bit of cash…shake our heads at the ludicrous way the place is run (but are quite unable to change anything because no Caymanian likes to have a foreigner tell them what to do) and cheerfully bugger off home at the end of our stay. Equally, as all the Caymanians are busy sitting in offices, being important and making up jobs for each other and all the ex-pats are well trained professionals (or they wouldn’t have been allowed here in the first place) who’s going to mop the floors, cart trolleys and generally to all the donkey work? Happily, there’s a multitude of Jamaicans and Hondurans desperately keen to earn Caymanian wages (even donkeywork on Cayman pays enough to support a family back home) and happy to do all the work that Caymanians won’t do for the simple reason that they don’t have to and that the white ex-pats are overqualified for. That’s how the society functions here; class delineation corresponds almost perfectly to nationality. It’s a situation that affords the Caymanian people a standard of living comparable to any of the world wealthiest countries whilst having very little part in maintaining said standard of living and so being totally dependent on foreign nationals to fill in the gaps left by an entire society cramming itself into the upper-middle class. OK, not all Caymanians fit into this picture of things. Some do other things; learn professions and so on. There are always the stupid and the lazy (lazier, I mean), the increasing crack-smoking faux gangsta section of the youth of the country, who won’t get jobs – aberrant factions of society, who don’t fit the pattern (one of my patients described himself as being from ‘the ghetto’ the other day – he meant a square kilometre up the road where the houses need a lick of paint and most families don’t run a second car). Generally speaking, though, society functions as I describe above and very nice it is too for most of us – particularly the natives. What I can’t get my head round, then, is the total lack of insight into the way things work and the constant underlying resentment of foreigners from the population as a whole.
Expats, it is muttered (and written in very concerned and usually badly spelled letters to the newspapers), come over to the island, take jobs away from honest hard-working Caymanians (I’m told there is such a thing…) and end up taking Caymanian dollars off the island – weakening the economy. Weakening the economy? We are the economy. Where the bloody hell do they think all their money comes from anyway? Fish? Aside from which if there was a Caymanian capable of doing my job, there’s not a chance in hell I’d be here.”
Gawwd damned!!!!!! You NAILED it.
“For a start, having ‘status’ entitles one to be treated as a Caymanian by the legal system. Conviction of a minor drug offence, for example, will see a Caymanian cautioned or possibly fined. A foreigner, however, will be looking at several years in prison followed by deportation.”
This is the literal opposite of reality [as seen again recently with lil’ miss Kimpton bartender – https://caymanmarlroad.com/2024/10/01/bartender-fined-in-drug-importation-case/%5D, much like most of those garbage blog posts from some bitter nobody immigrant who couldn’t make it work in paradise and had to retreat to their original shithole. We can empathize though; we wouldn’t want to go back there, either.
We hope you enjoy the rest of your stay!
Oh do give it a rest. There are thousands of perfectly incompetent and useless non-Caymanians floating about the place in both the public and private sectors. These are the types who find their built-in gift of self-promotion and overblown sense of worth as soon as they wash ashore and start job hopping about the place. And despite their griping they never bloody leave. Because they’ve never had it so good and it’s fantastic to be a bigger fish than you ever imagined in a little pond like this.
18 years later, the major difference to the above is that a lot of those blue collar job expats are now Caymanians. However, the expansion of the economy means the demand for foreign labour continues to outstrip what the multi generational and first generation Caymanians can service, so the reliance on foreign labour continues. But resentment of foreigners has if anything expanded, as added to the strains in 2005 we now have the burden on infrastructure as well as attributing a lot of our social problems to both the new Caymanians and the even higher proportion of low paid expat labour.
This is rubbish. For many years all new subdivisions have had to provide a stormwater management plan designed under N.R.A. specifications that then has to be approved by N.R.A. and installed prior to the subdivision being registered. The C.P.A. will not sign off on a subdivision until N.R.A. has approved the installation.
something has to give here!. We the people are paying he highest of salaries in the Region and beyond to Useless, drunken, sold out reps who can’t (not Will) solve any bloody issue affecting these Islands/
It’s a crying shame that no amount of tears can mitigate. What can change the tide though is; we the people, need to stand up and say no to payouts for votes whether by cash. fridge, stove AC, boat or whatever. THis madness has to stop Cayman. we need to march them out of the Admin Building, cause they aint no Saints. and have proven in many cases they are not capable. And I am not just talking bout the UPM, but the above also refers to the PPM and yes Mac Bush who has no UDP for he felt that he was KIng of the Road.
Sadder days are coming if we don’t find intelligent, educated committed new blood to run in the next elections.
Well said and more!!!
Highest salaries in the region? Our back bench MP’s earn more than the Prime Ministers of most countries on earth.
Is that (storm management) why they built lookout gardens three feet above belford estates. The water just pours in from there ever since.
No building should be permitted that has a finished floor level at less than 10’ above sea level. Swamps are needed – not only for the environment – but for drainage.
When we get the next big hurricane people will be dying in their homes because of these decisions. We are condemning the poor (those that can least afford the consequences) to be the victims of any hurricane. Keeping the walls up and roof on a structure by having it built to Dade County standards all becomes irrelevant if it (and its occupants) are 10 feet below an entirely foreseeable 15’ storm surge.
So they could act as Lookout over Belford silly!
Yes they have to provide for it in the plans, but no one is monitoring/checking if it is actually being done. There are 2 new developments that have gone up in my area and the rain water drains from their property straight onto the road which now floods. per planning, water should no drain onto a different property that is not your own
NRA absolutely checks. They require an engineer’s report.
Clearly the stormwater management plans are not fit for purpose!
No use having storm water specifications if the system is not maintained. Much of the flooding occurs because drainage is blocked.
Meanwhile planning approves a 85 acre housing development on swampland
And the “Darwin Award” goes to…….
*cue drum roll*
The Worldclass, my A$$, CI Civil Service / Govt!!!!!!
CPA not civil service, bobo
The CPA is bound by the regulations put in place by the Civil Service Tee Dee.
but it al thompson….so what you going to do???
Storm in a teacup
More like soup bowl or biggest mug!
The Cayman Islands, as a territory, is in the state of total Government Failure. It won’t get any better. They simply can’t not only understand/comprehend the scale of the upcoming disaster in all critical areas- transportation, ecology, waste management, disaster preparedness and management, crumbling infrastructure, but even SEE these problems. Solving these problem is an impossible task simply because of the brain power absence at all levels of governance. And tragically, there is no one who qualifies to form and run a competent government.
These islands are doomed. There are no true leaders, brainpower and expertise.
plenty of brain power…but they are prevented from running for office.
welcome to wonderland.
The few that do run would be outnumbered by idiots. Panton proved that theory.
bot alert with the thumbs down!
We are all paying the price for greed and corruption at all levels of our society. One function of government is to protect its citizens but not here.
Cayman is now in its sixth decade of massive and sustained economic growth. The last half century demonstrates that Cayman is completely unwilling to plan in any way for the size of the population associated with this growth or to implement the kind of infrastructural projects and improvements it requires.
Asleep at the wheel as usual. Over development and over population is turning this island paradise into a bad dream, as its not yet quite a nightmare. Maybe thats the only time Cayman’s visionless Political class act. If i get elected at some point i assure you i would fix this island in one term.
Zero new work permits, zero new permanent residence grants and zero new Apartment/Condominium development for 8 years. After the first 4 years Caymanians, Expats and Tourist will be praising this position. CUC ridiculous contract would be terminated and any Bank found charging unscrupulous fees would be nationalized. Its time to fix this place. If you agree email, “i’ll vote to: ThinkCaymanStrong@gmail.com
LTD Da Unboozler.
You can spit this populist BS as much as you want. 4 years into your plan this country will be bankrupt and look like every other Caribbean island with no money and no prosperity. It will put us back in the Stone Age.
You understand that it is impoverished work permit holders that are making us look increasingly like every other Caribbean Island?
You have my vote and 30 more.
How about storm shelters to population ratio since Ivan, build rating circa 1990’s, and their 2024 survivability rating? Cayman really needs to consider buying land in Honduras (or somewhere else) and flying people off the islands to a shelter there, for anything above Cat 3.
Honduras??? No thank you!!
Honduras? Really?
Proper, dedicated, fit for purpose storm facilities and shelters, hell yes. Flight to Honduras… no thanks.
more soundbites and anti-development waffle…
what recent developments have not followed approved storm water management plans?
You tell us!
Lotus – the rain water runs from their car park straight onto the road causing it to flood now
canal point has been a swamp since 1994
ok…then sue planning
And yet the CPA are busy granting further development of areas where drainage problems will be exacerbated, though I am sure the ownership by the former CPA chair is entirely incidental 😉
The geniuses from WAC already have all of Red Bay dug up and looking like a war zone to band-aid their crappy water infrastructure. They could have just piggy backed some drainage pipes and some pumps in there while they were doing it.
Holland was built below sea level several centuries ago and we are too stupid or stubborn to deal with a bit of rainwater in 2024? It’s not rocket science. Just get it done.
Ironically two of the chief geniuses at WAC hail from Holland😂🙄
the most true statement ive read on CNS “the government has no plan”. The only plan they have is to collect their paychecks and lifetime pension. We’re on our own folks!
What happens if the country goes bust similarly like Jamaica or Honduras? Would these Morons still expect a pension check every month?
Drain the swamp!
Government Administration Building!
I said it before and I will say it again. Wayne should have put planning under his ministry but he came under pressure and gave it to Jay. Under Jay development is exploding and not in a good way. Jay cannot sit there and say he didn’t know this would be a problem but let us not forget that others have pleaded ignorance and got off.
As Wayne points out, there is a dirty word called discretion in the planning laws and most other laws and it depends on what mood they wake up to how this discretion is used.
It has been suggested that discretion has been used to delay or turn down Caymanians trying to do development due to political interference. I hope those on the planning board and nra board are started to squirm cause this will be made public very soon.
Wayne also correctly points out that there is nothing in the long awaited PlanCayman that addresses storm water management.
Could it be that this would step on some developers toes???
This government’s term is coming to an end and the usual we will get a team together to address it when they promised that 3 years ago.
Let us fact check – this Government is raiding the environmental protection fund to buy land. Do you really think then based on their actions they are taking this issue serious????
The only two intelligent, non-criminal, and non-corrupt MLAs were/are Wayne and Andre. They couldn’t form a government without buying off the morons with so-called ministries.
Garbage in = garbage out.
After watching the last few years you still think Wayne is smart? Seriously he was a complete failure.