Editorial | Whither the drainage plan?

The flooding and traffic gridlock caused by the thunderstorm over the capital on Friday starkly reminded us of the drainage problem faced by Jamaica’s cities and towns, and raised questions about the status of the “master plan” to solve the crisis, which Prime Minister Andrew Holness promised more than eight years ago.

Dr Holness returned to the issue two years later, in 2019, announcing that his administration was going to tender for specific designs for the project.

Now, six years later, it is unclear what has happened with the initiative. Yet, the problem is more acute, with a growth of concrete, high-rise offices and apartment blocks that have caused an exponential increase in runoff during storms. There is no compensatory expansion of the drainage system.

To be clear, Friday did not represent an extraordinary weather event. For a few hours in the afternoon, a tropical wave that intensified over the Corporate Area triggered lightning, thunder and torrential downpours.

Within minutes drains and gullies overflowed, roads were akin to rivers, traffic slowed to a crawl, or was otherwise gridlocked. Journeys that normally took a few minutes turned to hours.

Homes, offices and stores, even in critical business districts, were flooded. In some areas, the authorities put out sandbags, hoping, it seems, to stem the flood.

CHANGES TO DENSITY RULES

It is not that Jamaica, or the Kingston Metropolitan Area (KMA), had not experienced flooding of this scale before. The difference was the short time this one took to reach this intensity. Which suggests that if something does not happen rapidly, things can only grow worse.

This observation is neither profound nor new. It has long been known that drainage is an issue for a large portion of the capital region, which sits on a sloping plain that runs west to the sea, with overhanging hills and mountains to the east. There are also hills to the north.

Indeed, in the 1950s, discussions started on building out a network of concrete gullies along natural water courses to deal with the periodic flooding.

Work began in 1963 on the first (Sandy Gully ) of what became a network of 11 concrete gullies. The project took more than a decade to complete.

The Jamaica government report for 1960 on the plan to construct the Sandy Gully said: “ Based on the findings of the report (on Kingston’s flooding problem), it was decided that the gully course which was formed naturally on the western side of the capital should be enlarged ... to take care of the surface water and the problem of guiding it to the harbour in a safe manner. The discharge, based on a 50-year storm cycle, is in the order of 77,000 cu ft per second.”

That discharge assessment was before the concretisation of the idea of global warming and climate change, with its extreme and unpredictable weather events.

Other things have also happened. The KMA has expanded and much more of the flood plain is under concrete than six decades ago. The drainage system has hardly expanded, and many of the existing ones have not been sufficiently maintained. Some are in serious disrepair.

Add to these problems the advent of plastic waste that clog water courses, contributing to flooding.

More recently, there have been changes to the density rules, leading to a boom in high-rise construction, without a matching growth in infrastructure. It does not help that up to a third of Jamaica’s population lives in informal settlements, often with an absence of, or inadequate infrastructure.

NO SPECIFICS TO DRAINAGE PLAN

In the aftermath of floods in 2017, Dr Holness, among his proposed solutions, talked about a “master plan” for modernising the drainage systems. He did not expand on the issue.

Then in September 2019, the prime minister told Parliament that the National Works Agency had completed a “comprehensive drainage plan”, which would cost up to US$150 million to complete.

The specifics of that plan have not been publicly ventilated, but the prime minister said at the time: “We have done the request for proposals for a drainage design for Kingston and St Andrew. Hopefully, they will go to contracting within a month, and the period of design will be this month.

“Hopefully, we will have that ready in terms of the major drains that will have to be reconstructed or new drains to be put in Kingston and St Andrew.”

In addition to Kingston and St Andrew, the Government, Dr Holness said, was looking at upgraded or new drainage systems for the towns of May Pen, Clarendon; Santa Cruz, St Elizabeth; and Port Maria, St Mary – “... areas that flood regularly”.

He might have also mentioned Montego Bay, St James, which, two days before Friday’s event in the Kingston Metropolitan Area, suffered its own flooding.

Speaking about the drainage plan in that 2019 speech, Dr Holness said: “When we are done, the entire Jamaica will be fully developed. Indeed, improving our road infrastructure is critical to productivity, connectivity, and building a prosperous new Jamaica.”

We fully appreciate that money might have been a problem in proceeding with the project as intended. It would, however, be useful to know just where it is, what is its current scope, and the timeline for its implementation.