Bamboo #3 remained dry last week, while several neighbouring communities were under water. The engineer who installed the flood-mitigation systems in the community over ten years ago, is now appealing to the government to replicate the mechanisms in other flood-prone areas. Reporter Rynessa Cutting and camerawoman Kerry Patrick visited a few sites on Tuesday.
00:00This aerial shot, taken by a member of the public last Friday, shows extensive flooding of the Karani Plains in the vicinity of Bamboo No. 3.
00:12However, a short distance away is the residential community, which remained flood-free.
00:17Civil engineer Ken Daljand says it's thanks in great part to a custom solution he installed over 10 years ago, which channels water through the drains into a contained chamber with a rubberized valve.
00:32It's a self-cleaning structure. This hasn't been cleaned in 12 years and there's no silk inside here.
00:37It operates in one inch of differential. So once you have one inch of positive elevation behind the gate, that valve is going to open. It's a rubberized check valve.
00:46Once the river rises one inch above the water level in the catchment, that cuts off. It locks.
00:53So you have one-way flow, constantly, automatic. No human intervention, like a sluice gateway, you have to run down there with a wrench and operate the flows.
01:03This backflow structure here is saving the government millions of dollars in having to pay out compensation and stuff to people in Bamboo No. 3 here.
01:11If we were to implement this throughout, it will pay for itself and more.
01:15The chamber is the second half of the two-part solution. The first is a 3D trash rack, which prevents debris from entering the lower part of the drainage system.
01:26You don't want a big boulder to come close to the grating. So what I did, I created a deep sump, right, where a heavy object rolling around the invert would fall into that area and be intercepted there before it gets to the grating.
01:40The lighter floating garbage will be skimmed off and will be collected at one point. It's working well, as I just mentioned.
01:48So far, I can safely say that over the years, we've collected more than 100 tons of garbage there.
01:54The flood mitigation system was implemented approximately 12 years ago through the then Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources as a test, but never rolled out on a large scale.
02:05In the meantime, flooding continues across the country due to vulnerable mitigation measures like sluice and flap gates.
02:12The culprits. Two logs stuck in the flap gate, preventing it from shutting off the flow of water.
02:40Daljand says this is but one of many vulnerabilities of such mechanisms.
02:46This place had around three feet of water, right? So again, the flood gate, the flap gates has its limitations.
02:53It is not to be implemented in areas of high debris and urban garbage and trash because that would prevent it from closing tight.
03:00So you wouldn't have a tight seal, as we saw just now. And again, the entire community here is susceptible to flooding.
03:07Now, that's not the only gate. There are several gates here with the same problem.
03:11A little lower down, we observed another flap gate stuck ajar due to seized up hinges.
03:17Also, the flap gates here, the metal flap gates. People will want to steal those for the value of the metal.
03:23That's a lot of money in metal here, right? And according to one of the residents here, they tried to steal it, but they couldn't lift it out.
03:29So again, we're looking for viable solutions.
03:41TV6 News has brought these matters to the attention of the Minister of Works, Renasa Cutting, TV6 News.
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