From Barbados Today, Just rain? We still ain’t ready yet posted Nov 20, 2025:
This past weekend offered Barbados a harsh and necessary wake-up call. A few intense hours of rainfall – focused largely on one side of the island – were enough to overwhelm roads, trap residents, claim the life of one man, and stretch our emergency services to the limit. It wasn’t a tropical storm. It wasn’t Hurricane Melissa. It wasn’t a system with a name.
…Sunday’s flood didn’t just expose weak infrastructure. It exposed a national mindset that remains dangerously reactive. Too many people still treat preparedness as optional, inconvenient, or something reserved for named storms. But climate change has removed the luxury of predictability. Extreme weather no longer waits for hurricane season, and danger no longer announces itself days in advance.
If a single rainfall can paralyse sections of the country, then we are living in a new normal, and it is one we have yet to fully accept.
The science has been clear for years: rising global temperatures mean the atmosphere holds more moisture, leading to heavier, more intense bursts of rainfall. Storms strengthen faster. Flooding happens quicker. Systems form outside the traditional season. And even when no storm is present, a tropical wave or simple convection can deliver rainfall intense enough to threaten lives.
No-name storm in Nova Scotia on July 22, 2023 Bluewater Rd intersection with Hammonds Plains Rd. . Photo and related video (on facebook) by Kelly Regan. The white object is the roof of a communications cable van.
Writing from Nova Scotia, I can say we are very much in the same mode, often experiencing the residues of the same tropical storms/hurricanes that affect Barbados, and then surprised by ordinary “no-name” weather. We also are surrounded by ocean. In the summer 2023 we had record rainfalls, catastrophic floods and I thought, yup that’s the warmer ocean and at least it will prevent summer forest fires. But then in 2025 we had record drought and late summer, highly destructive forest fires, some still not out and rural wells still dry…
So, much agreed : “we are living in a new normal, and it is one we have yet to fully accept”. Pls take care, all.
– david p