By Trudy Simpson, Staff ReporterTONS OF garbage were left uncollected on several major thoroughfares in downtown Kingston up to midday yesterday as collectors stayed away from the area following an outbreak of violence on Saturday.
Gunmen had swooped down on sections of the busy shopping area, letting loose a barrage of gunshots on Beckford Street, West Street and Matthews Lane, which cut down five people and sent 13 others to hospital. Also, the violence forced store proprietors to pull down their shutters early, bringing an abrupt end to the busy shopping, as they have had to do for about six other Saturdays during this year.
Of the garbage collection, Alston Stewart, head of the National Solid Waste Management Authority (NSWMA), told The Gleaner yesterday that "we had to suspend it and we didn't go back down until this morning, but we are down there now."
Only last week, the NSWMA, which is responsible for garbage collection in St. Catherine, St. Thomas, Clarendon, Kingston and St. Andrew, said that violence and tensions within inner-city communities were taking a toll on its garbage collection efforts.
The agency said violent outbreaks often resulted in roadblocks being mounted, which prevented collection crews from going to communities to remove garbage according to schedule.
The resulting pile-up of garbage then takes longer to be removed and places an additional strain on the scheduled service to other communities, the NSWMA said in a statement.
Garbage collection has been affected also by the authority's ageing and malfunctioning fleet of trucks. The NSWMA has been waiting for months for some 20 compactors promised by Government. The hold-up has been caused by the supplier's insistence "on a sovereign guarantee for the line of credit so we needed to go to Parliament, and Parliament will be taking it in its first sitting in December," Mr. Stewart said.
The authority said it would be rehabilitating waste compactors over the next four to five weeks in order to boost lagging garbage collection by mid-December 2002.
Only half the fleet of waste compactors are available to carry out garbage collection. The other compactors were malfunctioning and require major repairs, the NSWMA said.
The violence has also prevented the Kingston and St. Andrew Corporation (KSAC) from continuing to remove stalls from no vending areas in downtown Kingston.
No amount of pleas and threatened protests from vendors and their associations or reported threats made against the life of Town Clerk, Errol Greene, had stopped the action, which was carried out overnight each weekend for the past few weeks.
The KSAC had scheduled the removal of stalls on Beckford Street and North Parade over the weekend, but cancelled the plan on the advice of the security forces.
"The police advised against it. In addition, the police and the military support that we had in place had to be diverted to deal with the situation there and further to that, because of the gunfire and all of that, I wouldn't want to put my workers at risk," Mr. Greene said.
The Town Clerk promised that the KSAC and its support team would be back removing the stalls in the coming weekend.
