By Damion Mitchell, Staff Reporter
Suzan Clarke and Hylton Campbell stand near what used to be their dasheen and corn farm in New Holland, St. Elizabeth. Since the flood rains in May, last year, the land has been waterlogged, making it impossible for them to tend to their crops. - Michael Sloley /Freelance Photographer
ALMOST A year after flood rains pelted the island, the devastation is still evident in Clarendon and St. Elizabeth, which were among the worst hit.
A number of houses were damaged in some communities, farmlands eroded, a few people lost their lives and the dreams of many to make life more comfortable all but went down the drain.
Eleven days before the first anniversary of the floods, victims recall the disastrous week of May 22, 2002. Their stories are different, their emotions varied, but common among the victims is that they are yet to recover from the tremendous losses and emotional torment brought on by the floods.
"It all started with a little drizzle and ended with a flood," Carmen Smith, who lives on Bailey's Avenue, near Bushy Park, Clarendon, recalled. The disaster came just days after Miss Smith had stocked her make-shift 'clothes shop', located next to her humble abode. Three days of heavy rains resulted in a section of her house collapsing and her shop being partly submerged by water, which rushed from the hills of Rectory Road, Bailey's Avenue and Longsville and was just too much to be accommodated by a canal which runs through the community. Huge boulders are still embedded in the canal.
"When mi look and see that everything gone, I grieve," lamented Miss Smith, gazing at the structure that once housed her clothes shop. Asked if she would ever be able to recover the losses, Miss Smith said "it could happen if wishes could come true."
Shortly after the floods, which claimed the lives of 10 people, Prime Minister P.J. Patterson declared the parishes of Manchester, St. Elizabeth, Clarendon, St. Catherine and St. Thomas as 'disaster areas' and announced a $1 billion flood relief to fix the island's infrastructure. The agriculture sector recorded losses totalling more than $500 million.
In Osbourne Store, Clarendon, a large area of land was under water for several months.
Faye Chin, a businesswoman, operates a chicken farm in that area. While she considers herself lucky, given that there were no chickens on her farm at the time of the disaster, she said hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment was destroyed during the floods. "We were refurbishing the (chicken) houses at the time so no birds were lost, but we lost all 20 of our feed line motors," she recalled. Each motor is valued at about $22,000.
"The beauty is that we were not totally dependent on the chickens, so we have been subsidising the farm from our other businesses," she said. However, Mrs. Chin said that with the existing "unfriendly" economic climate "the spending power" is not the same.
In Contrivance, Manchester, farmers are still reeling from their losses. "What little reserve I had to do replanting I had to use it to put me back on my feet," said potato farmer, Grace Jones.
But for Neville Griffiths, it has been an "uphill" task. "The rain really give me a 'beating' last year," said Mr. Griffiths, noting that his field was entirely eroded during the two weeks of rainfall. He said that while he has managed to re-cultivate the produce, his hopes for rewards from last year's crop were literally washed away.
In Mandeville, a proper drainage system has since been constructed on Confidence Avenue, but a chronic drainage problem still exists at the Hanbury Road, Caledonia Road intersection. However, there were no indication that corrective measures have been taken in communities in Clarendon and St. Elizabeth, which also suffered the effects of blocked drains.
What was once a farm is now overgrown with shrubs on a water-logged field, and brings back memories of the May floods for Suzan Clarke and her family in New Holland, St. Elizabeth. Pointing to the area in her back yard, Miss Clarke said the water has still not receded following the floods last year. However, she said there were reasons to celebrate as her family was spared.
But after the floods came what would otherwise have been an unusual phenomenon, except that it happened in one of the areas 22 years before. Water began rising from underground in the communities of Newmarket in St. Elizabeth, as well as Harmons, Content and Trinity in Manchester.
And while the situation is now back to normal in Trinity and Content, sections of Harmons is still under water and it may be another three months before normality is returned.
The Gleaner gave an account of the scene in Content when a team visited the community in June, last year: "Early in the morning the village was deserted and the water, though somewhat receded, (still) covered the root of a huge tree which probed into the ground like giant fingers. A bird in its branches with a twig in its beak reminded of the raven after the biblical flood and a rooster crowed as it strutted upon dry land where days before water gushed from the bowels of the earth."
