Drain Cleaning Exercise for Old Harbour Bay

The St. Catherine Parish Council, is to carry out a drain cleaning exercise in the flood prone Old Harbour Bay community next week, as part of its flood mitigation programme.
This, according to Superintendent for Roads and Works at the St. Catherine Parish Council, Winston Kelly, is part of an $8 million campaign, to be undertaken in the parish by the Council.
He told JIS News that specifically, drains in Blackwood Gardens and other areas would be targeted as these were deemed in need of urgent attention. He stated that drain cleaning was not a “new thing”, as every month there was some cleaning of identified critical drains across the parish. This involves digging, getting rid of dirt and grime, solid waste, trees and shrubs in the channels, to create free passage, he said.
“We’re going to use a backhoe and use hands where the equipment can’t go and use the truck to transport the material away because if you don’t move them it will go back down in the drains when the rain falls,” he explained.
The issue of drain cleaning was raised at a JIS town meeting at the Old Harbour Bay Primary School on August 18, where former Executive Director of the Caribbean Coastal Area Management Foundation (CCAM) Reverend Peter Espeut, an environmentalist, explained to residents that because of the coastal location of the area, water was coming down from neighbouring higher elevation areas, and that the existing drains were incapable of handling the flow.
Meanwhile, Mr. Kelly said in response to a suggestion that some widening of the drains was necessary, that in some areas this would not be possible.
“What I see down there, like those concrete drains in Blackwoods there is no capacity for widening but those that are open earth drains you might be able to get a few feet off them for widening,” he said.
He further noted that the drain cleaning exercise would provide, though limited, some level of employment for low-end labour aside from equipment hireage. “There’s always a labour component. It provides employment for persons because if you even use equipment, you still have to use labourers to shape up back the drains, so there’s always a labour component even when there’s a material and transportation content,” he told JIS News.