Editorial | Hurricanes and small things

With Tropical Storm Melissa still moving ominously and slowly towards Jamaica, the question is, how badly will the island be affected by the wind and rain expected over the next few days.

Jamaica didn’t fare too well in July, 2024 when Hurricane Beryl, which, though remaining out at sea, sideswiped the south coast, leaving a trail of destruction. Several homes and schools in the vicinity of the hurricane were damaged or destroyed. Electric transmission systems were also badly compromised. It was several weeks before many communities regained power.

Floods also destroyed agricultural crops, causing shortages, and driving up food prices and overall inflation.

The effects of Beryl, however, weren’t limited to the southern side of Jamaica. The entire island was impacted by the floods spawned by the millions of tonnes of rain the hurricane dumped on the island.

The recency of Beryl adds poignancy to the perennial question faced by Jamaican authorities at the start of each Atlantic hurricane season, and especially when a storm appears to be headed to the island: How well has Jamaica prepared?

The answer this time, judging by recent activity, is not good, well enough. There is a last-minute scramble to clean the capital’s major drainage gullies to mitigate possible flooding from Melissa.

CONSISTENT FAILURE

For this newspaper, the images of Robert Morgan, the minister with responsibility for works, overseeing the use of heavy equipment to de-silt and remove tonnes of sand and debris from the lower reaches of Kingston’s Sandy Gully, stands as a metaphor for the consistent failure to do the little things, and to get them right.

The image is made even more disturbing by two facts.

First, it was merely a month ago that a few hours of rain, on a Friday afternoon in Kingston, caused severe flooding in the capital, leading to widespread traffic gridlock. There were disturbing images of vehicles being swirled around on normally busy city streets. In several instances, drivers and passengers were in danger of losing their lives.

The September floods ought to have galvanised the authorities into immediate overdrive to clean drains and gullies.

Second, all forecasts were for 2025 to be an active Atlantic hurricane season. And it has been. The fact that the current storm is named Melissa means that there were a dozen named storms before this one.

It has just been Jamaica’s luck that none of the previous ones came close to the island, or that they petered out in the Atlantic and-or the Caribbean Sea before posing threats to land masses. Which is not a signal for the authorities to have dropped their guards.

Jamaica, and the capital especially, has undergone a boom in high-rise construction in recent years, following the government’s raising of room densities in several communities. More areas have been plastered with concrete to accommodate multi-family apartment towers and office blocks.

POLICY FAILURES

This policy decision has led to increased runoff during rainfall. Yet, it hasn’t been supported by improvement in drainage capacity in the capital or elsewhere. The September flooding in Kingston, and a day earlier in Montego Bay, St James, were another side of the density question and a tale of policy failures.

Nearly a decade ago, Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness spoke of the formulation of a comprehensive drainage plan for Jamaica that would cost tens of billions of dollars. While the government has periodically referenced the project, nothing concrete has been offered about its timetable for implementation.

In these circumstances, if the big projects aren’t affordable at this time, it would be expected that the little, less expensive, and meaningful things would get done. Like the unclogging of drains, and de-silting of Sandy Gully, as well as the others in the network of gullies that form the backbone of the capital’s drainage system.

These gullies were originally natural waterways that drained the Liguanea Plain upon which Kingston was built and expanded. They were aligned, deepened and widened and paved in the 1960s in a massive engineering project, which hasn’t been matched since. But the gully network can no longer manage the expanded city’s drainage needs during ever-increasing major weather events.

Yet, instead of orderly preventative maintenance, Jamaicans are presented with the kind of spectacle they were offered this week: of Minister Morgan, under an umbrella, standing on the invert of Sandy Gully while graders and frontend loaders dislodged islands, and the foliage thereon, and loaded them on big trucks for removal. The intent was to show a government in charge and a minister on top of things.

There is a better way: doing the small things continuously, and doing them right. It is also cheaper – if the money is properly managed rather than siphoned off.