Mayor Darrell Bradley says overflowing drains and flooded streets will be fixed

Darrell Bradley

At the launch of the re-inauguration of the Battlefield Park, the media took the opportunity to ask the mayor about several issues affecting the citizenry of the Old Capital. Aside from their discontent with the new bus routes, streets and drains is another issue that has been affecting Belize City residents. Darrell Bradley says that there are several projects that will be introduced to address the overflowing drains and inundated streets. 

Darrell Bradley, Belize City Mayor

“We have several projects. In cases where we can afford drains, we do put in the drains; for example along Chetumal Street. We have a lot of other streets that we invested in quite expensive drains. We also have tried the policy and practice of having storm drains so that for example Handyside Street, Driftwood Bay; the street itself is built like a drain; it is built on a pivot and it has storm drains along the side that run the water away. What we are seeing though that for storm drains to work, which is inexpensive, you have to have a system of storm drainage because what happens is that the water runs off one street, collects in an area and then runs on another street. So we recognize that this is a problem. We are also working with a company to build pre-casted triangular drains; two slabs that we can just dig out the drains and just set drains in there. And we are going to very shortly start a project in between all the streets among Mahogany and the river which we recently resurfaced—like Flamboyant, Jasmine and those streets—and we are going to see if that works, and that’s likely to be very inexpensive, then we will experiment with that throughout the south side. That’s likely to be worked on the south side. One of the things we also recognize is a problem is that we don’t have a good system of monitoring and cleaning drains. So we have identified hotspots in front of ITVET, by Hyde’s Lane in front of the Queen Street Police Station and we have gone in these areas on Hyde’s Lane and Freetown Road and we’ve clean out those drains so there is a less pooling of water there.”