THE DECAY OF MARACAS BAY
Story and photos by MARK MEREDITH
Trinidad and Tobago Sunday Express, 2003
ON WEDNESDAY morning the clouds settled black and lowering on the mountain slopes above Maracas Bay. At Annette’s Bake and Shark Rishi Singh was busy digging a small trench from the base of the family’s vending hut to the drain that runs parallel to the road before emptying into the Maracas River.
Glancing anxiously up at the approaching downpour, he muttered: “Is every day I doing this.” His channel was one of many examples of do-it-yourself drainage. A series of small trenches had been cut among the knee-high weeds in the sand behind the row of beach vendors’ huts, forming a lacework delta of murky water it was hoped would escape to the drain.
But when the rains at Maracas come, and the tide is high and the river full, everything that is supposed to go down to the river comes back up. Dark liquid spills back up the channels from the main drain, out from the waste tanks buried in the sand by each