Heavy rains flood sections of Corentyne

Heavy rains pounded several sections of the Upper Corentyne Saturday and early yesterday, leaving some livestock farmers with millions in losses and other residents with flooded yards and homes.
The areas that were heavily affected were from Eversham right up to Number 62 Village.
The inundation is being blamed on a storm accompanied by heavy thunder and lightning in the Berbice area beginning Saturday night and continuing yesterday.

However, Kaieteur News spoke to a number of affected residents and they all share the view that they experienced heavier rains before but there was never any flooding to this extent.
Even well after midday, the water was seen seeping onto the roadway on some sections of the Upper Corentyne highway. Many residents watched in disbelief, questioning how the rains could have caused such flooding.
However, Chairman of the Number 52- 74 Neighbourhood Democratic Council (NDC), Mr. Abdool Ghannie refuted reports of a seawall breach in the Upper Corentyne.
Re-migrant Bibi Hussain of Letter Kenny, Corentyne has a large poultry farm at Well Tank Street, Number 57 Village and she claims to have lost over 6,000 chickens, totaling some $3M after her farm was flooded.
She took Kaieteur News on a tour of her farm where dead chickens were seen strewn in stagnant water.
“When my husband came this morning at 06:00 hrs, the whole yard and chicken pen was flood out and we have 3,000 four- week-old chickens and 3,000 baby chicks– all flood out and all died”.
Mrs. Hussain estimated $3M in losses.

“I don’t know if they can help us get back a part of the money (we invested), because it is $3M we loss there…it’s about five years I am farming and the first time something like this happened, it always have heavy rainfall and it never happened; we had more heavy rains than this but this never happened”.
Other small- scale poultry farmers, too, complained to this newspaper about their losses. One resident also lost 100 chickens in the Number 57 area.
Mrs. Hussain said that she and her husband re- migrated to Guyana five years ago since they wanted to return home to contribute to the development of their homeland.
However, they said this loss has discouraged them greatly, especially since they believe poor drainage in the area is heavily responsible for the occurrence.
She is pleading for some assistance from the government “to start the business back…because it’s like, you know, whatever we had there (at the farm) is everything we paid for and we don’t have anything to start back with”.
Another resident, Mohan Ganpat, stated that he saw a huge ‘alligator’ (caiman) swimming in the water near his house early in the morning.