Over the past few days this newspaper, as it has always done, published photographs that were taken around the country – mostly in Georgetown. One of them showed a pump set up at Le Repentir Cemetery draining the floodwaters which had disrupted burials recently, into the Sussex Street trench. The other photograph showed a group of about four or five workers, who said they were contracted by the Ministry of Local Government, with long poles attempting to clear the Hunter Street trench.

There must be very few places in the world where the maintenance of the city’s infrastructure makes the news. The reason it does in Georgetown is because whereas in other places it’s mundane, here it’s extraordinary. The average 20-something-year-old citizen knows squat about roads being resurfaced, drains being cleaned and outfalls dredged every month; or about grass verges being manicured and trees trimmed. He or she is more than au fait however with flooding and its consequences and the current unsightly appearance of the city.

But this is Georgetown’s new normal and city dwellers had better get used to it, because for the foreseeable future it is unlikely to change ‒ unless, of course, there is some miracle.

It is likely that the longed-for local government elections will be held this year. So there is going to be some change in City Hall. However, the elections by themselves are not the remedy for what ails this city. Whoever the brave soul is who takes the reins is going to have a hard time changing the status quo. We have no Bloombergs in Guyana and the nouveau riche throwing up huge concrete structures all around the city have shown no inclination of doing anything that is even remotely philanthropic. Preservation of themselves and their wallets/purses is instead the order of the day. This is why they hire ‘junkies’ to remove their waste at $200 a pop, rather than professional waste removal services.

Georgetown is beset by the same problem facing major cities all around the world – overcrowding. Thirty years ago, the world’s population was around 4 billion. Today it stands at 7.2 billion and counting. The majority of these people live in cities. In many places, the cities expanded to make room for the population boom. The planning for rural to urban migration, longevity and the reduction in infant and under five years mortality took into consideration such things as shelter, water supply, sanitation, electricity supply, roads, drainage and parking facilities, among other things. Before and during the boom, these plans were put into effect so that today, even though overcrowding remains an issue, the strain of it on the infrastructure is not as great.

But in Georgetown, there was very little movement towards this, if any at all. The city limits were extended and at one point certain areas were referred to as Greater Georgetown. Otherwise everything remained constant ‒ or didn’t. An electricity grid set up to serve some 90,000 buckled under the weight of providing 24-hour power to some 300,000. Something had to give and it was the power that went. Blackouts ensued and became a buzzword. There was no way the water and sanitation services could survive that sort of onslaught and these too became dysfunctional.

The answers to these breakdowns were almost immediate. Water storage tanks and trestles quickly became part of the landscape – a must on all building plans, whether commercial or residential. Private sanitation services sprung up, providing services through the city government, whose woefully inadequate trucks were on their last legs. And when the private/city arrangement stumbled, unscrupulous citizens took to the willy-nilly dumping of refuse. Meantime, as all other city infrastructure crumbled under the weight of providing for too many people, more and more people migrated to the capital. Finding no housing available and unhindered by the authorities, they put up shacks and squatted on urban green spaces that originally functioned as drainage or lent to the city’s fresh air and ambience, compounding the problem.

The lawlessness that has become Georgetown’s new normal lends to danger, given that the city is below sea level. Unregulated and unauthorized building, the filling and covering of drains, the ubiquitous dumping of garbage and building materials and the ineffectual running of the city combined pose a threat to life that the authorities are yet to take seriously. The 2005 Great Flood ought to have been a wake-up call. It wasn’t. Nor, it seems, is any close attention being paid to the fact that flooding has now become part of the new normal. It seems that it will take a much greater catastrophe to save Georgetown, and we are by no means referring to local government elections.