Getting ready for floods, landslides in Trinidad

Trinidad Express: June is here, and the dry season that wasn't will assuredly give way to a rainy season, or a more-rainy season, with full-blown episodes and disruptions resulting from heavier precipitation. This is life in the tropics, as ever familiar to Trinidad and Tobago, where it's always either a dry season or a wet one.

But life, to the extent that it's governed by environmental conditions, has not been the same. The year 2012 has conspicuously lacked a really dry season. The hillside vegetation has remained lush; the bush fires never caught; the skies never showed cloudlessly blue for long; and the word "drought" never entered conversation as a real and present danger.

Is that good news, or what, at a time when a hurricane season has already been declared open? For people who never got to put their umbrellas in storage, it has certainly been reassuring to hear from the T&T meteorological officials that the unseasonable rainfall since January has been good for something.

Some crops, they said, have benefited. About how this has affected other crops, T&T will be sure to find out, for food prices typically influence the rate of all inflation.

The officials were speaking at the start of the hurricane season, an annual meteorological turning point which Trinidad, if less so, Tobago, has traditionally been privileged to greet with a shrug. Once again, the national state of preparedness against storm events appears hardly improved over that of previous years....