On a grey, rain-threatened Easter Monday, residents of Amity Hall’s Gazer Road neighborhood in St James, Jamaica, surveyed the muddy wreckage of their properties and braced for more disaster. Just 24 hours after heavy downpours swept through parts of the parish, the community remained on edge: with the Montego River still choked with unremoved debris, another storm could bring a repeat of Sunday’s destructive flooding, leaving families displaced for a second consecutive day.
Sunday’s flood, which sent river water pouring over the banks and into residential properties, stirred up harrowing memories from last October’s Category 5 Hurricane Melissa. When the waters receded, they left behind thick layers of mud, tangled debris, and new losses that have set back slow, already fragile recovery efforts for local families.
Janet Dawkins, one of the hardest-hit residents, spoke with the Jamaica Observer amid the clean-up, her voice frazzled with worry. ‘People’s lives are in jeopardy, we are in jeopardy. The water flows right around our homes; we need help,’ she said, repeating her fear as dark storm clouds gathered overhead.
Dawkins explained that the small bridge connecting Gazer Road to the rest of Amity Hall suffered major damage in Sunday’s flood. If residents had not worked through the day to clear broken debris, the crossing would have been completely cut off, leaving the community isolated. ‘We cut up the debris with saws so we could get across. We packed it ourselves yesterday just to be able to leave the area,’ she added.
Local residents have pinned the blame for the repeat flooding on the buildup of trees and debris left uncleared in the Montego River since Hurricane Melissa struck last fall. That debris has piled up against the bridge, acting as a makeshift dam that forces rising flood waters to divert into the surrounding neighborhood instead of flowing downstream. For Dawkins, the damage went far beyond the flood that soaked her home: she lost all the building materials she had stockpiled to rebuild her small on-site shop, which was first destroyed in the hurricane.
‘I had stone and sand, everything washed away. Half my building blocks got carried off by the river; the impact is devastating,’ she said dejectedly. ‘I put up a new stall just three weeks after the storm, and yesterday the river came down and knocked it right down.’ Dawkins has joined her neighbors in an urgent appeal for authorities to clear the river, clearing the debris that puts the community at constant risk of repeated flooding. ‘We want help, we need help. I need help to rebuild my shop, and we need help to get the river flowing again. It can’t stay like this,’ she said.
For Mark Samuels, another Gazer Road resident, Sunday’s flood put his partner and young granddaughter in danger. Samuels was not home when waters rose to nearly two feet inside his house, and neighbors had to step in to evacuate his family before he returned after 8 p.m. When he arrived, he found his entire home — including the small shop he runs from the property — coated in mud and filled with debris. Samuels and his family spent most of Easter Monday shoveling muck out of their property, and the constant threat of future flooding has left him under crippling mental stress. The blocked section of the bridge sits just meters from his back door. ‘I know that when it rains, I can’t sleep. I’m always watching, always ready to run. I worry all the time about my family, and we are human beings too,’ he said.
Tameika Brown, another resident who spent all of Sunday and Monday cleaning up her flood-damaged home, said the disaster has reawakened the trauma of Hurricane Melissa. She was at church when Sunday’s rains began, and returned home late to find the same destruction she had worked for months to recover from. ‘It’s not a good feeling. It brings back all the trauma from Melissa, and it puts you right back in that place of being traumatized all over again. It’s not good, but this is our life now,’ she said resignedly.
Michael Allen, councillor for the Somerton Division, told the Observer he has been pressing authorities to clear the river channel since Hurricane Melissa passed last year. ‘Right after the hurricane, the whole river was blocked and families were already flooded out,’ he explained. Allen confirmed that clearing the Montego River falls under the responsibility of Jamaica’s National Works Agency (NWA), and he has repeatedly reached out to the agency to request cleanup crews. He also contacted Edmund Bartlett, Member of Parliament for St James East Central, who dispatched a tractor to the site — but heavy machinery was not suited to the work and could not clear the blocked channel.
Allen followed up three weeks ago to alert Bartlett that the tractor had failed, warning that any future rain would trigger flooding if the river was not cleared. Now, he says, his warning has come true. Beyond the damage to homes, Sunday’s flood also destroyed a section of Gazer Road that Allen had recently lobbied to repair at a cost of J$3.5 million. Work on the road was just completed last week. ‘Last week they finished the front section,’ he said wistfully.
Allen confirmed that 10 homes were directly impacted by Sunday’s flooding, and he has joined residents in calling for urgent cleanup of the river bed before more severe damage occurs. ‘If they had come when I called first, this would never have happened. The flood waters pushed the accumulated debris down to the bridge, and that’s when it flooded the whole neighborhood. Now residents are left to pick up the pieces,’ he said.