Barnett Tech Park suffers significant hurricane damage

The Barnett Tech Park in Montego Bay suffered significant damage as a result of Hurricane Melissa, leaving more than 6,000 workers in the global services, or outsourcing, sector without a job for now.

Mark Kerr-Jarrett, managing director of Barnett Limited, developer of the tech park, said all the ground-floor buildings were flooded by the overflow of two rivers in the city. The development sits on 48 acres of land once used for agricultural purposes. And Kerr-Jarrett is urging the government to urgently address the flow of the rivers to avoid a recurrence of such devastating flooding in the future.

“We had four feet of water through the entire park because the Montego and Barnett rivers overflowed – wow; the same overflow that washed out West Green and Catherine Hall. We have mud on the ground floor of all the buildings,” Kerr-Jarrett said in an interview with the Financial Gleaner last Thursday.

The tech park operator said there was significant damage to equipment at the tech park, which houses different call centre businesses, resulting in the tenants there having to send home all of their workers.

“The generators were submerged, the fuel tanks compromised, all of the electrical panels, switch gear, transfer switches, everything was under water and has to be thoroughly cleaned,” said the tech park developer. “There was some damage to the big rooftop AC units, damage to the walls and part of the subdivision road … . It’s a huge clean-up and we are in the recovery process,” he added.

Kerr-Jarrett is still assessing the extent of the damage not only to the property, but in terms of the outsourcing business that may migrate to other countries.

“I have no idea” of the cost of the damage, “but it is not cheap,” he said. “You have to look at all of the work that has to be rerouted to other countries. It would be great if it can be rerouted to within Jamaica, but it may have been routed offshore.”

Explaining the flooding, Kerr-Jarrett said the abutments for the old iron bridge at Westgate acted as a dam and restricted the flow of the river, but got backed up during the storm. That led to flooding down to Pye River.

“The river came up out of its natural channel by over 25 feet. Then came another four feet on top of that, flooding an area of 400 acres, and another 800 acres in West Green and Catherine Hall,” he said.

“A thorough review of the entire river needs to be done all the way to the source,” he said. “The river needs to be realigned, opened up and put into a condition where it can channel all of this water more efficiently”, otherwise the flooding will happen again, he warned.

Melissa hit Jamaica on October 28; its destruction was concentrated mainly at the western end of the island, as well as St Elizabeth and St Ann.

President of the Global Services Association of Jamaica Wayne Sinclair said despite the devastation to facilities in Montego Bay, the sector stood up well to Melissa.

“Under the circumstances, the sector has been quite resilient. Our companies in Kingston and St. Catherine would have been relatively unscathed because the hurricane didn’t hit that area of the country that much.” Sinclair said.

Jamaican outsourcing company itel says its Kingston operations are fully functional, while its site in Montego Bay got back to business on November 6.

Itel founder and CEO Yoni Epstein said the sector “remains strong and united” amid the devastation and that his company had established a relief line to gather information on affected team members even as it conducts a needs assessment of those staff who are on-site.

In the parish of St James, of which Montego Bay is the capital, companies were reporting 50 per cent to 75 per cent attendance at work and were able to operate relatively normally with internet service from Flow Jamaica, Sinclair said.

“The biggest issue that we’ve been facing is that a lot of our team members have been marooned in areas that were really severely damaged by the storm. So transportation either just can’t get to them or they can’t get into Montego Bay because of fallen trees, road damage, and so on,” he said.

luke.douglas@gleanerjm.com