With more than five decades of professional experience spanning major infrastructure projects across three Caribbean nations, a decorated veteran civil engineer has delivered a stark warning about the critical state of Barbados’ stormwater drainage networks, linking decades of faulty policy to accelerating road decay and growing flood vulnerability across the island.
Andrew Hutchinson, whose career covers civil, structural and environmental engineering with deep expertise in stormwater management, watershed modeling and rainwater harvesting, shared his decades of on-the-ground insights during a recent Friday webinar focused on how poor drainage systems undermine urban infrastructure. His assessment pulls back the curtain on longstanding systemic flaws that have left Barbados ill-prepared to handle intense seasonal rainfall.
Hutchinson argues that substandard drainage is not a minor infrastructure issue—it is the single leading driver of road deterioration across the entire island. Rating the country’s current road drainage infrastructure just 2.5 to 3 out of 10, he emphasized that policymakers and planners have repeatedly failed to recognize drainage’s outsized role in preserving road integrity.
The roots of the current crisis stretch back to road expansion projects carried out in the 1980s, Hutchinson explained. Instead of acquiring additional land to build out full, functional drainage networks, project leaders opted to remove existing drains and replace them with narrow kerbs and slipper drains. This cost-cutting shortcut effectively turned the roads themselves into makeshift drainage channels. When heavy rains hit, water cannot run off the road surface into designated storage ditches, leaving water pooled on pavement until it overtops kerbs and floods adjacent private and public land.
This short-sighted policy has created generational damage to Barbados’ road network, the engineer added. Compounding the problem, the Barbados Water Authority regularly excavates trenches to install utility connections, and often fails to properly restore the road surface after work is complete, creating additional weak points that break down faster when exposed to standing rainwater.
Hutchinson pointed to the ABC Highway as a proven model of what proper drainage design can achieve. Unlike nearly all other major roads on the island, the ABC Highway includes purpose-built stormwater ditches that capture runoff, store it temporarily, and allow it to gradually drain into underground wells, fitted with grates to block debris from clogging the system. Even after heavy downpours, the system works as intended, keeping road surfaces clear and preventing downstream flooding.
Beyond large-scale infrastructure design, Hutchinson stressed that every stormwater project requires rigorous hydrological analysis tailored to the size of the local watershed, and encouraged widespread adoption of specialized modeling software like HydroCAD to guide design decisions. For any watershed larger than 10 hectares, engineers must use modeling to calculate precipitation rates for 24-hour storm events and decide whether to design for 10-year or 25-year storm events to ensure long-term resilience. A core, often overlooked, factor in this modeling is the time of concentration— the period it takes a drop of water to travel from the farthest point of a watershed to the infrastructure point of interest, such as a culvert. Getting this calculation wrong leads to undersized, ineffective drainage systems that fail during heavy rain, he explained.
To address the current crisis, Hutchinson has put forward a range of actionable solutions, starting with expanded adoption of low-impact development drainage systems that boost water infiltration and slow runoff. Options like GeoWeb permeable surfaces and grassed parking lots, he noted, create durable, usable surfaces that can even handle heavy truck traffic while allowing rainwater to soak into the ground rather than running off. For areas with limited open space, Hutchinson recommended the installation of small check dams in natural gullies and underground stormwater chambers in dense urban areas, which provide critical extra storage and infiltration without requiring above-ground ditches or ponds that take up valuable space. He highlighted existing successful examples of this approach on the island: underground storm chambers are already in use near Kensington Oval and along Highway 5, where there was no room for above-ground storage infrastructure.
During the webinar’s question-and-answer session, Hutchinson doubled down on his call for widespread deployment of natural and built water storage solutions across Barbados, including expanded check dams, retention ponds, detention areas and rainwater harvesting systems. These interventions, he argued, could dramatically reduce the severe flooding that regularly hits urban centers including Holetown, Speightstown and Bridgetown, while also recharging the island’s depleted aquifers and boosting long-term water security for all Barbadians. When asked if the island needs to prioritize expanded water storage, he answered simply: “I would say yes to all of the above.”