Coastal Plain Highway Flooding Raises Resilience Questions

Questions have emerged today about the resilience of the Coastal Plain Highway after floodwaters forced the temporary closure of a section of the roadway due to inundation.  The closure came amid heavy rainfall that has impacted large portions of the country and generated localized flooding across sections of the Stann Creek District. The affected area near Mile 16 on the Coastal Plain Highway was reported impassable earlier today as water overtopped portions of the roadway.  Despite the flooding, Chief Engineer in the Ministry of Infrastructure Development and Housing, Evondale Moody, says the situation should not be viewed as a failure of the highway’s design or construction. Moody explained that the road was built with climate resilience in mind and has performed as intended despite being subjected to extraordinary rainfall amounts and runoff conditions.

Evondale Moody, Chief Engineer, Ministry of Infrastructure Development and Housing: “These problems that we’re having are only within 100 meters or 200 meters sections of the highway. It’s not the entire highway. So for the most part, the entire highway has performed well, but it’s only these small areas that has created bottlenecks for us. And those are areas that we will have to continue to work with. We don’t know what other areas will be affected as we get into the rainy season, but we’ll have to monitor them and then we go from there. We have to bear that the extent of works we did along the Coastal Highway we basically upgraded 36 miles of road, which is a huge section of highway that we have improved and we have to bear in mind that that area was and still is a flood prone area. There are a number of catchment areas within the Coastal Plain Highway that we have constructed floodways that we know will flood in the event we have intense rainfall. There are also areas that has been deforested because of development and those areas have created an impact on the highway itself. The intensity and the reoccurrence of these events has significantly affected us and I believe it will continue to affect us no matter how much we raise the road. Many of that section of the highway has been raised significantly especially the area that I’m speaking about approaching the Soldier Creek Bridge and so we anticipate that those areas will continue to experience flooding. We have done our best to ensure that we have put in place the erosion protection measures, but the more we do, it seems as though the more intense the rainfall comes and we have to try and address that as best as we can as we move along. We have done significant improvement works to the Gales Point junction which is approximately around mile 22, whereby that was originally asphalted. We went back in and we raised the road junction. We concreted it and the rainfall that we had between last night and this morning was still high enough to overflow that road as well. However, because of the additional drainage structures that we put in place that area has already been receded. And so we haven’t seen any damages within that area, but it was still over top even with the amount of additional work that we have done in that area.”

The Coastal Plain Highway, a thirty-six-mile roadway linking La Democracia to Hope Creek, was officially inaugurated in July of 2023 following a major multi-million-dollar upgrade that transformed the once-rugged Coastal Road into a modern, paved transportation corridor. While temporary closures may be necessary during periods of extreme weather, Moody maintains that the Coastal Plain Highway remains a critical and resilient transportation link connecting central and southern Belize.