Officials of the Ministries of Works and National Emergency Management told Amandala today that at about 11 this morning, the temporary wooden bridge at Kendal was submerged under 10 feet of water, following heavy rains across much of the country on Wednesday.
The Kendal and Middlesex bridges were both impassable this morning due to flooding – severing vehicular traffic from southern Belize from the rest of the country.
CEO in the Ministry of National Emergency Management, Colonel George Lovell, told our newspaper early this afternoon that flooding had also washed away both approaches to the Middlesex bridge on the Hummingbird Highway in the Stann Creek District, but by noon, the west side had already been repaired. He projected that the crossing would be completely repaired by the end of the day.
The situation was much worse at Kendal, however. CEO in the Ministry of Works, Cadet Henderson, told Amandala that the temporary bridge—installed in late 2008 after Tropical Storm Arthur washed away the ferroconcrete bridge—was submerged in 10 feet of water at 11 a.m., but the waters had been subsiding by the afternoon at about 3 inches every 15 minutes.
Reports out of NEMO this evening indicated that the situation had almost returned to normal, as the water had gone down about eight feet, and was only about 2 feet over the bridge.
Henderson cautioned that since a permanent replacement at Kendal – for which the government is trying to procure funding from the Caribbean Development Bank – could take years, there could be several repeats of today’s situation during the rainy season, which began at the start of the month, on June 1.
Information to Amandala from the National Meteorological Service indicates that the heavy rains on Wednesday, which caused the flooding, were a result of a tropical wave interacting with unstable conditions in the upper atmosphere.
It rained very heavily in the mountains and the runoff merged with waters that had fallen in the Stann Creek Valley area.
Official hydrological data said the Baldy Beacon mountain station recorded 4.8 inches of rainfall, while Middlesex recorded 2.6 inches. Belmopan recorded the most rainfall on Wednesday, totaling 5.69 inches.
Henderson said that the rainfall also submerged the Sibun Bridge in the Belize District, but the water subsided on Thursday morning.