LITTERING remains a driving cause of the country’s flooding problems, Works Minister Jearlean John has said.
Her comment came while delivering a statement at the Trinidad and Tobago Disaster Risk Management Conference and Expo 2026 in Port of Spain yesterday, where she underscored the need for a culture shift towards waste disposal and treatment of the environment.
The conference was held under the theme ‘Resilience 360: Bridging Knowledge and Action’.
John said for the most part, a ‘disaster’ meant events such as hurricanes, flood or an earthquake, which are dramatic, sudden and external.
However, she added that in disaster risk management, ‘disasters are not simply events. They are outcomes’.
‘They are the result of hazards meeting vulnerability, and vulnerability, in large part, is something we create when don’t pay attention, when we don’t set, insist or enforce standards,’ John stated.
The minister said she wanted to speak ‘frankly’ on T&T’s flooding problem, stating that ‘a significant contributor to flood-related disasters in Trinidad and Tobago is us. Our habits. Our choices. Our culture.’
John said informal vendors dispose of waste in drains and ‘business owners do not ask where the person hired to cart away garbage dumps it’.
‘I can tell you, he dumps it at the first interchange he gets to when he thinks no one is looking,’ John said.
The Works Minister said after every major rain event, the drainage infrastructure is overwhelmed not solely by water volume, but by the volume of solid waste people have introduced into the system.
John noted that she meets every Monday morning with the operational team of the ministry, to review what went right or wrong and how to improve, including identifying gaps and planning her site visits for Wednesdays.
‘Because when you see me at night looking into manholes being cleaned, it is because some of these spaces have not been cleaned in a consistent, cohesive manner for years,’ John stated.
‘When you see me on an overpass, I am looking at the garbage, the dinginess, the mess, the deterioration,’ she said, adding: ‘When you see me on a river bank, it is ensuring that the backhoe perched there is actually paying for what was contracted, because that could be an entire Hollywood production.’
Engineering change
John said the ministry is moving from reactive post-disaster repair to a proactive, life-cycle approach that embeds resilience at every stage of development, adding that disaster does not begin when the rain falls but the ‘day we make the wrong decision about where to build, what to clear, and what to ignore’.
According to the minister, engineering change included cultural habits and planned development. She said policy should translate into roads that remain passable during floods, bridges that could carry communities through extreme events, drainage systems that were maintained before disaster strikes, coastal works that protected rather than displaced risk, and people that would not litter by throwing garbage through car windows.
John said in addition to the easy target of littering, there were issues of illegal construction in watercourses, ignored building codes, and the assumption that Government would fix what was broken.
She said these were ‘systemic cultural patterns that have evolved over decades, and a ‘civilisation recalibration’ was now required. She called for a ‘fundamental shift in how citizens understand their relationship to shared infrastructure, shared environment, and shared risk…The connection between neglect and disaster is not abstract; it is mechanical and predictable. A bridge that is not inspected regularly develops structural deficiencies invisible until failure. A drainage culvert left uncleared accumulates debris until it redirects floodwater into communities. A coastal revetment not monitored for subsidence fails incrementally until a storm event triggers catastrophic collapse. With proper maintenance systems in place, these outcomes are sometimes preventable,’ John stated.
