Transcript
DOROTHY WICKHAM: Yeah it's been really bad, it's actually affected a lot of schools closed for the day because a lot of the roads were flooded and it's just really badly affected our main roads. So it's really playing havoc on our first two months of 2017.
JAMIE TAHANA: And I understand that last week around Honiara was particularly bad - some suburbs became flooded.
DW: That's right. I think one of our issues here is that Honiara suburbs are all sort of at the bottom of valleys instead of on the ridges of the hills. So the runoff down from the hills is pretty bad when we have heavy rain. When we have rain here it's really heavy rain - it comes down really badly for about an hour or two and then it stops and then it comes back again, that's how our normal rainy season works and it's worse this time because of that low depression.
JT: This flooding in the Honiara suburbs, has it been particularly bad? Does it compare to those big ones of a couple of years ago? Have any houses been affected or anything like that?
DW: There were a couple of small landslides, you know. We also have a problem where people tend to dig hills and build houses on slopes without really realising that on a sunny day it's OK, but when it starts to rain constantly the topography will change if it gets wet, and we have these landslides all over the place and houses being totally flooded because they sit at the bottom of a hill. So it's affected us in a way that, I think, has also made a lot of people think about how they build their homes and where they build their homes now.
JT: OK so people have lost their homes in these landslides?
DW: Oh yeah, a few ones have had their houses collapse and have just had their house totally damaged because of water going right through the house.
JT: So where are those people now?
DW: Well the evacuation centres that I know they have moved some people into have been mostly schools, classrooms and church halls, like the national secondary school students they evacuated in a church hall here in town, they moved all the students who don't have parents in Honiara - who come from the provinces - into these halls, and some of the families who have been affected have moved to other relatives, or some of them have actually taken refuge with church groups or other NGOs who might be helping some of these areas.
JT: Right, and on wider Guadalcanal and some other islands some of the farmers are particularly affected. The Small Farmers Association is saying about 70-80 percent of some farmers' crops are gone.
DW: That's right, some farmers have actually lost 100 percent of their farms - they are totally under water. The chairman of the association issued a statement and said some of his members had lost 100 percent of their crops and are looking to government authorities like the National Disaster Management Office to assist them, or even the Ministry of Agriculture to help them recover from this loss because when they lose their crops they actually affect the food supply for Honiara because they're the ones who actually feed the central market and you can already see in the market that it's already affecting certain vegetables and certain root crops.
JT: What has the government response been so far?
DW: The National Disaster Management Office has sent assessment teams to the affected areas and I think the Ministry of Agriculture is also assessing wherever farmers have gone and sought help and assistance from them and I think they're looking at trying to see whether they can alleviate some of these issues, maybe with new seeds. At the moment, a lot of these places are still underwater, the sun hasn't really come up for a whole day yet.
