Belize is experiencing its second catastrophic and record-breaking flood event in just four months, and even though it was not as deadly as Tropical Storm Arthur, Tropical Depression #16 has affected three towns and several villages along the Mopan and Macal Rivers in Cayo, devastating agricultural fields, submerging several miles of highway, forcing mass evacuations, and severing the most populous part of Cayo from the rest of Belize.
By all accounts that our newspaper has received, no one expected that the flooding would have been so massive, exacerbated not by rains that fell over Belize, but by flood waters that flowed down from the mountainous terrain of eastern Guatemala, sparking two major flood waves in the Belize River watershed two days apart, on Friday and Sunday.
The flood water at San Jose Succotz washed away a truck driven by a man, accompanied by his two children. Reports say they appear to have been sightseeing in turbulent waters even after signs had been posted that the road was cut off from vehicular traffic. Villagers came to the rescue of the man and his children, and fortunately no lives were lost.
Overall, there are no reports of casualities or fatalities. National Emergency Management Organization (NEMO) volunteer in Cayo, Harth Gillett, said that a man living off Branch Mouth Road woke up in water inside his small wooden house, just 10 feet from the river – caught completely by surprise. NEMO teams going house-to-house along the riverside rescued him, said Gillett.
Hydrologist Rudolph Williams told Amandala today that the flood was record-breaking. Waters rose the highest on record for Benque Viejo del Carmen, Belize’s westernmost town, he told our newspaper.
“Our records go back for the Benque area to 1978. Our gauges were never exceeded in that area, as far as our records are concerned,” said Williams.
He adds, however, that village elders said they saw a similar flood event about 45 to 50 years ago.
“People were not expecting this kind of flood,” said Pablo Chan, chairperson for the education, information and warning committee of NEMO.
Chan said that their search and rescue team, who depended on motor boats to access the villages, visited a family at Paslow Falls, roughly 2 miles from Bullet Tree Falls, over 5 times to beg them to evacuate. They refused, claiming that the floods have never affected their home, but when the waters came upon them, they were left with no choice but to flee to Bullet Tree. Still, they had to evacuate again, because that village too began to suffer unprecedented flooding.
Gillett told our newspaper that about 50 one-story homes in Bullet Tree had been submerged, some of them to their roofs.
According to Chan, the most impacted place in Cayo was Calla Creek. “We had to evacuate almost every family,” he told us.
He informed that 35 persons were taken from Calla Creek to shelter at the Sacred Heart Primary School in San Ignacio, but they were transferred to the IT-VET institution near the Belize Defence Force’s Camp Belazario in Cayo, where, he said, the amenities were better suited for the women and their children who had to be evacuated. A total of 51 people were evacuated from Bullet Tree, Chan said, adding that Succotz was not affected as badly and so they did not have to evacuate people from there.
Today, over 60 persons, mostly from the Bullet Tree and Succotz, are still being sheltered at the IT-VET in Cayo, and many houses, particularly in the Bullet Tree area, are literally under several feet of water.
Water levels in San Ignacio had been fluctuating since Monday, but by Friday, instead of water levels going back down, they continued to mount to astonishing levels.
Williams confirmed to Amandala that the water in the Macal River, which passes right under the Hawkesworth Bridge, which joins the twin towns of Santa Elena and San Ignacio, had risen 9.22 meters or in excess of 30 feet. The town had not seen such massive flooding for 13 years.
“This event, had not the Chalillo and Mollejón dams been in place, would have been a very big event, similar to 1995 or greater, when the water went on to Burns Avenue. This time it did not make it there,” said Williams.
Gillett, who lives in San Ignacio Town, told Amandala that even as the sun was shining brightly over the twin towns of San Ignacio and Santa Elena, “things changed dramatically.” He had just crossed over the low wooden bridge which motorists use to drive from Santa Elena to San Ignacio on Thursday when the water began to submerge the wooden bridge. By Friday, it was several feet under water.
“It took everyone totally by surprise,” he told us, even though he described the 1995 flood as “10 times worse.”
Gillett said that at about 3 in the morning on Friday, one of the neighbors heard a loud flushing sound made by the river. That rush of water, he believes, inundated the riverside and overflowed into the nearby streets. By 4 to 5 that morning, the river covered the first portion of the San Ignacio market, and just kept rising, he recounted.
The last time San Ignacio saw such a catastrophe, the flood waters filled up the entire Broaster Stadium, and people played canoe race from goal post to goal post, said Gillett. This time, the spectacle was what the flood had done to the town’s market and the bus park area, not far from the river, but the water did not come up as high as the last major flood.
“By 11 a.m., the water had already covered the market, People showed up from 3 in the morning. A lot of people were already out there, but were keeping an eye out and did not offload their stuff.… The water was coming in fast, at a rate of 6 to 7 inches an hour,” said Gillett.
Hydrologist Williams explained that the effects of Tropical Depression #16 started in the south of Belize, where it was forecasted to strike as a tropical storm last week. Government had issued a tropical storm warning, but even though it had lifted it on Thursday, flood warnings remained in effect.
Williams said that as early as Tuesday, October 14, the weather disturbance had already begun to impact Belize, and the dams at Chalillo and Mollejón had already begun to spill water, due to overland movement of the system and the rains it was dumping over the Cayo area.
According to Williams, it was the rains that were dumped by the system over eastern Guatemala, swelling the Greater Mopan, which had the snowball effect, astonishingly inundating western Belize to an extent that even the experts did not predict.
The waters gathered in the Belize River watershed, particularly in the Belize portion of the Mopan and the Macal Rivers, which meet just north of San Ignacio and merge into the Belize Old River.
“Both [the Macal and Mopan] started to rise around the same time. However, the Mopan rose significantly higher and exceeded both the Hurricane Mitch (1998) and the Hurricane Keith (2000) high water marks,” said Williams, adding that the water rose even past the 6 meter gauges out in Benque Viejo del Carmen, the westernmost town.
In order to determine how high the waters actually rose in Benque, said Williams, their team has to measure the high water marks – an exercise they won’t be able to undertake until the waters fully recede, perhaps sometime next week.
Meanwhile, over on the eastern coast over the weekend, heavy downpours were causing floods. Much of Belize City was under water on Saturday night going into Sunday morning, due to torrential rains. Belize City councilor, Philip Willoughby, the acting coordinator of the Belize District Emergency Management Organization (DEMO), said that even though some homes were flooded in the City, residents refused offers made by DEMO to help them evacuate. They insisted that they were going to ride out the storm in their homes.
NEMO in the Belize District area is meeting this afternoon, as they expect the floodwaters to affect a large portion of the Belize District, particularly the Belize City area and the Belize River Valley, over the next few days.
According to Hydrologist Williams, the first flood wave has already made its way down into the Belize District, and the second flood water is due to find its way to coastal Belize by mid-day Wednesday.
Already, the water has made its way past the Roaring Creek bridge, on the outskirts of the nation’s capital, Belmopan. At 6:30 p.m. Sunday, the bridge was closed to vehicular traffic, as waters reached two feet above the deck of the bridge. Today, official reports say that the water level is steady but expected to recede.
Currently, the Hydrology Office has to depend on reports from public, whom they contact via phone to determine the extent to which the river levels are rising.
Williams said that based on anecdotal information, they have been able to determine that the flood wave is somewhere between Banana Bank and More Tomorrow.
The flood water has already exceeded the 10-meter rain gauge at Banana Bank, which means that the water is up by 33 to 35 feet of water, and mostly impacting on agricultural lands, especially cornfields in the area.
Latest hydrology reports indicate that all the waterways within the Belize River Valley have overflowed their banks, as a consequence of the first flood wave that has already come down from Cayo to the Belize District. The second wave is expected to worsen the flood situation, though the impact is not expected to be nearly as bad as that experienced by the towns and villages in Cayo. Still, Williams projects that it could mean another record-breaking flood event for the eastern region of Belize.
Belize is not out of the woods yet, because sitting just offshore is a wide area of tropical disturbance, which is expected to dump further rains over the country over the next two days.
“Although it will be another record-breaking flood event, I don’t think houses will be covered up like what happened in Bullet Tree,” said Williams, forecasting the next flood wave to arrive within the next 36 hours.
The team expects further flooding of the Rio Hondo in Corozal and the New River in Orange Walk, should the forecasted rains strike.
“If the forecasted intensity of the rainfall materializes, people might have to move from the villages into shelters,” said Williams, “Belize City will see some of the effects of this flood event because the water cannot go anywhere else but under Haulover Bridge and through the Haulover Creek into Belize City. As soon as it hits the lower part of the coast, it will spread out and Belize City will be experiencing some high water as a result of that.”
Already, Monday’s rains in the City have chopped off certain major streets, and pedestrians are forced to wade through dirty water in some parts of the City, specifically Douglas Jones Street, Woods Street, Castle and Yorke Streets, and Baymen Avenue, among others.
“The first to feel the effects will be the newly developed areas that do not have proper streets. I am hoping that there will be no high tide at the time it arrives, to reduce the impact of the flood events coming through.”
Williams advises Belize District residents especially to pay attention to the official reports and be vigilant, because the forecast may change very quickly. He advises people to cooperate with NEMO advice to evacuate if and when it is given.
The very first signs of flooding were reported down south, in Stann Creek and Toledo. The North Stann Creek and the Sittee River in Stann Creek began to flood, and the Kendal causeway – a temporary replacement for the ferro-concrete bridge washed away by Tropical Storm Arthur in June – was washed away yet another time.
Williams reports that the southernmost watersheds of Monkey River, Toledo, (and especially Swasey Branch) were flooded as well, and the 8-meter rain gauge was also covered by water. Rio Grande, Deep River, and the Moho were all affected by the flood, and all of them exceeded their banks, but by yesterday they had retreated within their banks.
Stann Creek was affected more than Toledo was, Williams reported.
Gillett reported on KREM Radio Monday evening that Benque Viejo has been opened to buses and trucks, but not to small vehicles. Chan confirmed to Amandala today that the flood waters are receding. However, the Salvador Fernandez Bridge at Bullet Tree remains submerged with several feet of water.
Chan said that during a fly-over by the NEMO team on Sunday, they saw farmlands inundated from the border of Belize with Guatemala all the way to More Tomorrow, roughly 10 miles east of Belmopan, indicating that the massive flooding affected a large chunk of the Cayo District.
As we go to press, the inundated Bullet Tree Village – one of the villages most impacted by the flood – is still rendered impassible to vehicular traffic.
NEMO has advised area residents to be careful with the water, and especially to keep children from playing in it. Firstly, residents are advised not to drink from the river, as water contamination with sewage in some areas is very likely. Additionally, some area residents have reported seeing snakes, some of them poisonous, as well as living and dead animals being carried away by the flood.
NEMO is also working with the Red Cross to provide relief to people in the shelters, and officials are working with local authorities to provide clean, potable water to villagers affected by the flood.
Our sources all commend the NEMO team, including NEMO’s Cayo district coordinator Al Westby, for their hard work and dedication in ensuring that the flood victims were assisted and taken to safety where needed. More than that, they speak of the undaunted community spirit that saw neighbor helping neighbor to brave the catastrophe.