Prepare for More Rains and More Floods Later this Week

Over the weekend, several parts of Corozal District experienced severe flooding. The ground remains very saturated which is a cause for concern if Hurricane Beryl is expected to bring further rainfall. The fact that the country recently experienced a bout of severe drought may also lead to flooding in other parts of Belize. Tennielle Hendy, the Principal Hydrologist at the National Hydrological Services, explains.

 

Tennielle Hendy, Principal Hydrologist, National Hydrological Services

“The forecast for the north is still for flooding conditions to prevail. That is caused mainly by the excessive rainfall we received over the past couple of weeks. We are not seeing any riverine flooding which is different from precipitation related flooding. But there is the possibility that we do get riverine flooding from our neighbors, Guatemala and Mexico as we saw in Chetumal. The same time Chetumal was flooding, Belize in the north was also flooding but more recently the flooding we are seeing in San Roman, is based on excessive rainfall. That is called urban flooding. With any additional rainfall we can get, I would say with a minimum of six inches more we can see a combination of excessive rainfall coupled with riverine flooding. So you might be saying well you are using a lot of words what does this mean? It just means we will have flooding conditions for longer periods, because what we call localized flooding from excessive rainfall that runs into the river. but if the rivers are full where is it going to go? We also have to factor in tidal events. When the is a high tide the water remains stagnant or it starts to fan out or spread out and in areas that are not prone to flooding it becomes flooded. So there are a lot of factors we need to consider in terms of flooding that is why we work very closely with the met service and NEMO.”