Without heavy-duty pumps to alleviate frequent flooding on Bakery Lane, Pembroke Paint would lose two thirds of its business.

Owner David Swift installed them several years ago.

He told The Royal Gazette: “Without the pumps I could not get containers in to replenish inventory. We would have to truck everything else in through other roads.”

He thought a similar system could help the nearby Mill Creek area, which also contends with waters, sometimes three or four feet deep, after torrential rain or unusually high tides.

Mr Swift said a sluice gate at Mill Creek is operating well. It allows twice the amount of water to drain when the tide is going out. He thought pumps like his could help during times when the tide is coming inward or high. However, he warned that this solution is expensive and time-consuming.

“It makes a lot of sense, but the cost of installation, providing electricity and maintenance, and all those things, could not be borne by one person,” he said. “We pay a lot in electricity. We have had a little bit of help from other people in the neighbourhood but not very much.”

He and his staff often pull garbage out of the pumps, sometimes entire trash bags full, or bits of wood.

“This can damage the propellers in there,” Mr Swift said. “So we are constantly having to repair and rebuild. We have to do that several times a year. It is a huge exercise. The maintenance required is tremendous.”

He has sometimes been outside in a rainstorm at 2am trying to clear the machinery.

He is looking at installing screens to help filter more of the water before the pumps get damaged.

“That can be problematic,” he said.

His system consists of a drain in the middle of the road near Pembroke Paint. That drains into a six-foot-deep cistern at the corner of his building. The water from that drains into Mill Creek.

“We are all just trying to do the best we can,” he said.

When six inches of rain fell within a 24-hour period this month, his pumps removed 100,000 gallons of water from the area.

It was a lot even for his pumps to deal with, and there was flooding at the Bakery Lane and Addendum Lane South junction.

“We had 10 per cent of our annual rainfall between midnight Thursday and 8am Friday,” he said. “The water was the highest I have ever seen it on Bakery Lane. We usually don’t see that much unless there is a tropical storm. Bermuda is now 16 inches above our average annual rainfall.”

He said thanks to the pumps, his neighbourhood was dry the next day.

Unlike Mill Creek, the water on Bakery Lane is just rainwater.

“It is not salty,” he said.

Bakery Lane and Mill Creek are mentioned in the second of a two-part report on climate change released this summer by Mark Guishard a Bios adjunct scientist.

“In most cases, the road flooding eventually reduces via drainage and/or evaporation in a matter of minutes to hours,” Mr Guishard wrote. “However, in some cases [notably the areas named above], poor drainage means a reliance on pumping water away from the area to a different watershed.”

He said one impact of long-term climate warming is more water vapour in the air to feed heavy rainfall events.

Earlier this month, visiting seismologist and disaster expert Lucy Jones predicted that if the polar ice sheets continue to melt, Bermuda will be completely under water within 50 to 100 years.

Mr Swift sees the flooding in Pembroke as an indication that this is already happening.

“We know the water lens under Bakery Lane is rising,” he said. “It is just an inch or two below the tarmac. If it keeps on going, it will cause more and more problems with the cesspits in the area, or will come up through the cracks in the road.”

Adding to the problem are some of the larger buildings near by.

Mr Swift said there was one particular structure with a large roof and a small tank. When it rains hard, the tank overflows, contributing to the water his pumps have to remove, at the lowest point on Bakery Lane.

“We are just trying to do what we can individually to solve the problem with the limited resources that we have,” Mr Swift said.