A proposal submitted by Engineer Patrice Jacobs to the Mayor and City Council calling for a fully automated drainage system has been met with cautious optimism. The idea of technology-driven koker management, with sluices opening and closing in real time based on water level data, is forward-thinking and deserves serious consideration. But it addresses the tail end of a problem whose roots run far deeper, and far older, than any sluice gate.
Let us begin with a question that deserves honest examination: does Georgetown actually have a gravity drainage system? Technically, yes. The principle is elegantly simple: at low tide, koker gates open and gravity drains excess water from canals, farmland, and residential areas out to the sea. The koker system is a masterpiece of passive engineering, requiring no pumps under normal conditions because gravity and the tides do the work. But Georgetown sits roughly six feet below sea level. At high tide during a spring tide or storm surge, the Atlantic Ocean is literally higher than the city. That is not a gravity drainage system in any conventional sense. It is a tidal window, and that window is narrowing. 592HubClimate Tracker
As global temperatures rise, shorter tidal cycles mean kokers in Guyana have been experiencing reduced opening and closing times, with less differential between water levels to allow for gravity flow to remove excess rainfall from the land. Automating the operation of those kokers may make them more responsive, but it cannot conjure tidal windows that climate change is slowly closing. Kaieteur News
More critically, the real crisis in Georgetown is not at the kokers. It is in the arteries, the internal drainage network connecting streets, yards, and neighbourhoods to those primary channels. After nearly 24 hours of intense rain in early 2026, the real culprit was not a closed koker but clogged drains, debris-choked trenches, and a system that simply failed. Water that cannot move through the internal network will not reach the kokers, automated or otherwise. Kaieteur News
Two compounding factors are making this internal disconnection worse, and both are products of rapid, poorly coordinated urban development. First, road construction across Georgetown has consumed trenches and drainage channels that once formed the capillary network of the city’s water management system. Residents and commentators have noted that more drains and trenches should be built, not filled in to widen roads or clogged because of construction, whether it involves roads, houses, or business places. Second, the aggressive paving of surfaces across the city has dramatically increased stormwater runoff. Paved surfaces do not absorb rainfall; they redirect it. As more of Georgetown’s land is covered in concrete and asphalt, every rainfall event becomes a greater test of a drainage system already operating beyond its designed capacity. Kaieteur News
Georgetown is crisscrossed by the canals, drains, and gutters that take stormwater from roads and gardens and send it to the sea. That network was designed centuries ago for a far smaller city with far less impervious surface. It has never been comprehensively redesigned or expanded to reflect the Georgetown of 2026. The Nature of Cities
Engineer Jacobs’ proposal for automation is not wrong. It is simply incomplete. The City Council and the national government must address the full picture: restoring and expanding the internal drain network, enforcing regulations that prevent construction from eliminating drainage channels, and requiring stormwater management assessments before new paving projects are approved. Automating a koker at the end of a broken pipeline fixes nothing upstream.
Georgetown has flooded in 1888, 1934, and catastrophically in 2005, when nearly 39 percent of Guyana’s population at the time, were affected, with economic damage estimated at about US$465 million, representing 59 percent of the country’s GDP. The city flooded again in 2021 and continues to flood with near-regularity after every significant rainfall. The pattern is not a mystery. It is a policy choice disguised as a natural disaster. Wikipedia
The technology is welcome. The conversation, however, must expand. Georgetown does not need smarter kokers alone. It needs a city-wide drainage audit, protection of existing channels, and a binding commitment that no road project eliminates a trench without replacing its drainage capacity elsewhere. Until that happens, residents will keep wading through the consequences of decisions made above their heads, often quite literally.
Georgetown was built on water. It is past time we stopped treating that water as someone else’s problem.
Automation is a tool. Governance is the solution.
News Room Guyana, “Engineer proposes automated drainage system for Georgetown,” June 23, 2026
