 A combination of storms from the early 90s led to severe damage to St. Lucia's rivers. The Disaster Vulnerability Reduction Project, or DVRP, under the Department of Forestry spearheaded a long-term solution, a solution referred to as the assessment and rehabilitation of major rivers. The assessment of the rivers actually is part of a wider initiative that the Forestry Department would have developed several years ago with the initiation of the DVRP project. The five rivers are the Fodor, Trumase, Marquis, Kaldesak, and Shock rivers. Donnelly notes these rivers are integral to St. Lucia's. These watersheds have been critical to providing water for St. Lucia, the continuation of fresh water that could be captured or that's been captured by the water company Vasco. Canadian engineering firm CBCL has been contracted to conduct the functions of assessment and rehabilitation. CBCL was the firm that was awarded the contract to undertake the assessment and rehabilitation of major rivers. As the title suggests, there are two significant components. One is to assess the current status of the rivers with respect to the level of degradation of the riverbanks, the current conditions in terms of the hydrology, the amount of the quantity of stream flow, the velocity of stream flow, water quality, vegetation within the riverbank, the land uses within the wider watershed, whether commercial, residential, agricultural land uses, the presence of critical infrastructure such as roads and bridges. Such data would be used to inform the design of nature-based restoration intervention measures. This will be the first time these measures are used in St. Lucia. Another civil engineer of CBCL, David Parsons, explains bioengineering is a form of these types of interventions aimed at restoring the physical integrity of the rivers. Bioengineering is essentially using plants and vegetation and natural type of sources materials to help stabilize the banks. Instead of using heavy concrete and rebar and typical engineering resources to provide retaining walls, these are more what we consider soft methods that allow the river to kind of grow in their natural means, but it's producing reinforcement that might take longer to occur in its natural habitat. Based on the assessment, CBCL has indicated a variety of recommendations. Basically what we've provided is examples of detailed designs from kind of the, a little bit closer to hard engineering, where it would be a geotechnical, kind of a hybrid geotechnical and a bioengineering design, and then we've provided options right down to kind of fairly easy to employ, but a whole lot simpler and stuff from live stakes, live posts, waddle fences, little bit simpler methods. The process would reduce the need for the silting rivers every year and ultimately reduce the risk of flooding in all vulnerable communities. This is Jacques Kingston Compton of the Disaster Vulnerability Reduction Project.