Sandy Gully in need of attention – again

Had Tropical Storms Fred or Grace taken aim at Jamaica, it appears that the country would have been unprepared for its onslaught as some of the island’s drains – for which multimillion-dollar cleaning programmes have been announced in recent months – are already in a state of neglect.

In the Corporate Area, the Sandy Gully drainage network is among those in need of attention, with sections overgrown by shrubs, mounds of silt, and littered with discarded, old appliances and huge piles of garbage.

Residents of Washington Gardens, a community whose boundary runs close to a section of the Sandy Gully, told The Gleaner that the waterway has been in a deplorable state for more than 10 years, although it does not flood its banks during heavy rainfall.

According to them, apart from being an eyesore, the state of the drainage network exposes them to health risks.

Winford Dunn, who has lived in the community since 1969, said that the gully is a breeding ground for mosquitoes due to stagnant sewage.

He told The Gleaner last week that the state of the gully is due to debris being washed down from further up the network.

Charmaine Beckford, a resident of the area for more than 25 years, said “it never was like this,” expressing concern that the mouth of the gully could be currently blocked, causing a back-up of debris.

Recalling one of the years when the island had faced heavy rainfall, she noted that the drain water has the capability of rising very high.

Reminiscing on her youthful days, during a time when the gully was free from refuse, she said it was a place children would play when not making the trek to the nearby sea to swim.

However, this is now impossible as “old zinc, rubbish and old everything” has been deposited by community members.

Ccommunications and customer services manager at the National Works Agency, Stephen Shaw, has not responded to questions sent to him by The Gleaner, as requested, since Wednesday.

Our news team was also unable to reach Kingston Mayor Delroy Williams to discuss drainage-cleaning efforts in the Corporate Area. The Kingston and St Andrew Municipal Corporation had announced in June that it was embarking on a comprehensive drain-cleaning programme in several communities across the Corporate Area, targeting more than 100 drains.

Dennis Chung, chairman of the National Solid Waste Management Authority (NSWMA), told The Gleaner that although it is contracted at times to help clean gullies, the responsibility rests with the municipal corporations. But Audley Gordon, executive director of the NSWMA, said that since his appointment five years ago, the NSWMA has never been contracted to carry out such duties.

Chung is appealing to residents of informal settlements to desist from dispelling their waste into the gullies.

“The best thing people can do is bag their garbage,” he said, noting that NSWMA teams were also having challenges with how some residents put out their garbage for collection in these areas.

“The garbage is thrown out raw,” he said, which attracts rodents and causes health concerns.

“If people were to properly package their garbage, it would still be a lot of garbage, but it will be bearable,” he added, saying that the NSWMA can service these areas adequately without residents having to resort to throwing their garbage into the gullies.

For example, Chung told The Gleaner that garbage collection in areas such as Riverton City is done on a regular basis, with some visited daily.

“In a lot of these settlements, we do collect garbage on a much more regular basis than the established residential areas,” he said.

This is because these areas are much more densely populated and require much more attention due to the rate at which garbage is produced.

“If you drive off with the garbage now, within an hour garbage is there again,” he explained.

In a bid to help change the culture of waste disposal in some of these communities, the NSWMA launched a ‘Drum a Di Gate’ campaign in July.

Communities within the Sandy Gully area on Spanish Town Road will soon be included in the initiative, which is being done in partnership with Hardware and Lumber Ltd, to get residents to “containerise waste, reduce littering and illegal dumping,” said Aretha McFarlane, NSWMA’s director of operations.

“Some communities surrounding the Sandy Gully would qualify for the intervention as we seek to minimise illegal dumping, especially in waterways,” McFarlane noted.

She said that that under the Drum a Di Gate initiative, an assessment is first conducted of each community to work out the logistics for placement of drums and collection sites, as trucks may not be able to access some areas.

“[But] requests were made for drums since the roll-out of the initiative,” she said.

asha.wilks@gleanerjm.com