San Ignacio Market Square Floods as Macal River Overflows

One of the most severely impacted areas was San Ignacio Town Market Square and the Welcome Center. Since Friday, the banks of the Macal River had been overflowing, covering the low-lying bridge and flooding business kiosks and market stalls. Vendors and business owners are grappling with flooding in the area that rose several feet high. Despite a call for vendors to evacuate on Friday evening, many waited until the last minute to do so. Fortunately, Mayor of the Twin Towns Earl Trapp says the impact was not as bad when compared to previous years. He spoke to our newsroom about the cleanup efforts, indicating that the water levels are slowly receding. 

Earl Trapp, Mayor, San Ignacio / Santa Elena: “As of this morning I can tell you that water has been receding but has come basically to a standstill in terms of receding because of the high currents coming from the Mopan River so the water here is backing up and is not receding as quick as it would normally do. So it has come to standstill and I believe that until the current from the Mopan River is gone then this water will begin to recede much faster. At this time we are on the cleaning and recovery stage. The downtown area especially, the Welcome Center and the Market we have many of our manpower here washing and trying to get the market area clean from the sludge that built up because of the flooding. So that’s the main intention for today and tomorrow is to clean and restore the downtown area so that business can go back to normalcy. What we are looking at it’s mostly water damage and basically we had asked all the vendors to relocate and move all their equipment and their goods to higher grounds. In terms of the businesses in the Welcome Center and around the area that were inundated an assessment needs to be done and it’s my hope that they all removed their goods from the shelves. NEMO is more working in trying to assess and help the people in the villages more, villages along the Mopan River because that’s where some residents had to be relocated. So NEMO is more working in that area. I have already sent videos of a couple residents that were inundated or that were damaged by water to NEMO to assess and see how they can help these people.”

Trapp says the council will continue to monitor the situation and will discuss methods of mitigating flooding in the future. /