With tears in her eyes and a voice breaking with emotion, an impassioned grandmother told planning officials “you’re destroying Cayman” on Wednesday.
Wielding photographs of her flood-ruined back yard in shaking hands, Wilma Ebanks, 68, strode across the floor of the usually quiet meeting room in the Government Administration Building and challenged planners eye-to-eye as she told them she had been fighting flooding in her neighbourhood for six years.
She said, “I wasn’t going to come today but I said to myself, I’ve got to fight.
“This stuff has to stop. It has to stop. They’re filling up the swamp. What’s going to happen? There’s no drainage system.
“For six years I’ve dealt with this and now you’re going to give approval for more. They’re going to flood that area – there’s no mangroves left.”
Ebanks attended the Central Planning Authority meeting in person to object to a plan by the West Village Development Company Ltd for a multi-million-dollar mixed use development on Batabano Road, West Bay, of more than 80 apartments and 90,000 square feet square feet of commercial space.
It is part of a larger scheme which has already received planning assent.
“You guys need to take a long hard look at this, to the effects that this is going to cause,” Ebanks told the planning board members. “It’s Cayman people who are going to be flooded out.”
She said that, in 48 years in her home, she had never had problems with flooding until the coming of recent developments, which had left her having to spend thousands of dollars to undo deep flooding and flood damage to her property.
The planned West Village site would rise adjacent to another recently-approved development, by Legoland, for 96 apartments across 12 apartment blocks on Batabano Rd.
When that plan received the green light last year, nearby residents held a series of meetings to try and object, arguing that the clearing and raising of the land had immediately worsened flooding.
On Wednesday, Ebanks told the planning authority that taking all forthcoming developments together, there were plans for 386 new apartments in the flood-prone area.
“What are you doing with all the traffic?” she said. “We have Legoland approved, we’ve got flooding all around this area. This is what you are doing to our community.”
She added, “Planning has to look seriously at this. Consider what you’re doing. It will flood. You’re destroying Cayman.”
Her impassioned arguments seemed to find favour with the committee members, who were due to make a decision behind closed doors after the meeting, but will not report to the public for two weeks.
The planning authority’s deputy chair Handel Whittaker told Ebanks, “You do have a legitimate complaint, you do have a legitimate concern.”
Chairman Ian Pairaudeau commented, “When it rains, the cows will be knee deep in water,” and asked developers whether they could create additional deep wells, adding, ”We can’t force you to do that – I’m just saying that would be a very neighbourly thing to do.”
CPA member Celecia Bancroft, herself an architect, warned that deep drains are the first to fill when there are high tides or extreme weather, and called on the developers to add culverts, retention ponds, and routing for floodwaters to their plans.
When the applicants argued they had experience of such matters from their project at 19 North, a development on the Seven Mile Beach corridor, Bancroft retorted that 19 North is often so badly flooded “it looks like a canal – it looks like the movie ‘Waterworld’”.
The developers told the committee they would take concerns over flooding into consideration.
On behalf of the developers, Jonathan Murphy told the committee that they would “abide with code” for all elements of the construction, pointing out that the land in question was not mangrove swamp but grassland with bare rock under a thin layer of topsoil.
This submission follows a successful application in December 2021, granting permission for a commercial and residential complex of 179 apartments. This would supersede that proposal.
In the application paperwork, Water Authority Cayman made certain requirements of the developer, but those are based on “low water usage tenants”. The Authority notes that should any high usage tenants move in – for example, in the food service or laundry industries – water treatment and management infrastructure might need to be re-examined.
The Department of Environment noted that “nearby parcels (including the new Rubis Service Station and the Legoland apartment site) are highly elevated and the surrounding area is prone to flooding”.
The department added, “With the conversion of the site to hardstanding, drainage must be properly assessed”, arguing for the addition of sustainable drainage systems which mimic natural drainage patterns, rather than channeling the water through pipes and wells.
The land lies on Batabano Road, just west of Esterley Tibbetts Highway.
The proposal is for four buildings: one with 32,000 square feet of retail space and 58 apartments; one with 6,000 square feet of retail space and 12 apartments; a third with 600 square feet or retail space and 12 apartments; and a fourth with 21,000 square feet of retail space and 21,000 square feet of storage units.
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