TRELAWNY, Jamaica — A persistent light rain fell across Trelawny on Monday morning, but it did nothing to dampen the anger of dozens of residents from Salt Marsh, who gathered before dawn to shut down a key regional roadway. Their protest targets a complete outage of piped water from the National Water Commission (NWC) that has persisted since Hurricane Melissa swept through the area.
Protesters dragged large boulders onto the route and parked an abandoned car across the pavement, completely blocking access for all vehicles. The action has disrupted daily travel for hundreds of commuters, including schoolchildren and daily wage workers, who live in surrounding communities. The blocked road connects several settlements in both Trelawny — including Davis Pen and Johnson Hill — and neighboring St James, where the communities of Goodwill, Chatham, and Adelphi are located. All of these groups depend on the blocked thoroughfare to reach major population and employment centers in Falmouth and Montego Bay.
According to protesting residents, the water outage extends across a wide swathe of the region, covering households from the vicinity of Salt Marsh Primary School through large portions of the adjacent Davis Pen community. Beyond the inconvenience of having no running water, frustrated community members have added another layer of grievance: even though they have been forced to pay for expensive private water truck deliveries to meet their basic household needs, the NWC continues to send full monthly bills for its unused piped water service.
Personnel from the Jamaica Constabulary Force have been deployed to the protest site to monitor the situation as of Monday morning, with no immediate reports of a resolution to the dispute between residents and the water utility.