Post Hurricane Clean-Up Extended to October 7

The post-Hurricane Dean Clean-up exercise has been extended to Sunday (Oct. 7), to facilitate the further removal of all debris from communities in the corporate area.
“There are still a number of areas where debris is on the sidewalks, areas such as Vineyard Town and a number of areas uptown,” said Co-coordinator of the project, Kingsley Thomas.
Mr. Thomas, who was addressing the (Oct. 2) post-Cabinet press briefing at Jamaica House, said that while the two-day clean-up exercise undertaken last weekend was fairly successful, one of the major challenges was the turnaround time of the trucks that were being used to transport the collected debris.
“For instance, the rubble collected in Portland Cottage (Clarendon) had to be dumped and disposed of in Riverton City. That is a two and a half or three hours turnaround time in terms of truck time. The trucks were inadequate to collect all the garbage on time,” he pointed out.
In outlining the work that was undertaken in the corporate area on the weekend, Mr. Thomas said that the first day of the exercise was focused on the removal of domestic garbage from inner-city areas.
“This was considered extremely important because as the Ministry of Health outlined, there was the threat of dengue fever outbreak, malaria and leptospirosis, and so the focus on that day was to clean-up domestic garbage and that was substantially completed,” he informed.
Citizens in residential areas where asked to place all debris on the sidewalks for collection by trucks the following day.
Mr. Thomas expressed his gratitude to all the volunteers and private sector organisations that participated in the two-day clean-up activity.