By Javier Herrera
HAVANA TIMES – Cuba, the largest island in the Antilles and the 17th largest in the world, is sinking, but not because of climate change. The sea level has not risen. The coastline has not sunk. Cuba is sinking due to decades of neglect, decades of abandonment.
After April and May turned out to be unusually dry, June seems to have accumulated all the missing waters. Over 20 days of moderate to heavy rain have collapsed the storm drainage systems, causing floods in low-lying areas across almost all western Cuba, but more specifically in Havana.
Havana’s sewer system was inherited from the republic, built more than six decades ago. When the city’s drainage systems were constructed, the population was not even half of what it is today. To the age of the drainage systems, we must add the same decades without adequate maintenance and without creating new ways to evacuate the waters.
The city is crossed by multiple rivers and springs. These rivers and springs are clogged with garbage thrown over the same decades by local residents and several neighboring industries. Rivers that have not been dredged in the last 65 years, resulting in a loss of slope, flow, and capacity to evacuate incoming waters.
The heavy rains that began at noon on June 22, after almost 20 days of daily rain, extended until the early morning and resulted in an accumulation of 56 millimeters of rainfall in just three hours between 2 and 5 PM, measured at the meteorological station located across the Bay of Havana in the community of Casablanca.
The National Institute of Meteorology (INSMET) explained that a broad low-pressure center is currently observed over the southwest of the Gulf of Mexico, generating a large area of disorganized rains and thunderstorms. For this same reason, INSMET warns of numerous showers, rains, and thunderstorms in much of the country over the coming days, which may be strong in some localities.
Some of the most affected areas have been the low-lying areas of Vedado. These days we have seen water reach 11th Street (six blocks inland), with multiple damages to properties in the area, in
