Earl Moxam, Senior Gleaner Writer
A respected university professor is urging local authorities to cease further housing construction in Portmore, fearing a larger population in the municipality would only complicate an already fragile situation.
That fragility, according to Anthony Clayton, Professor of Caribbean Sustainable Development, University of the West Indies, is not unlike what became tragically apparent last week in New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.A.
New Orleans, a major city on the United States Gulf Coast, was one of the hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina, a Category Four storm, when it made landfall. The force of the hurricane breached several of the walls (levees) designed to protect the city, largely below sea level, from flooding.
The world has witnessed the resulting misery of the thousands of people flooded out of their homes in the 'Big Easy', while officials fear that thousands others died in the floods caused by the breaches in the levees.
IMPERFECT PROTECTION
Professor Clayton, speaking on Good Evening Jamaica, the Power 106 current affairs programme, warned that Portmore, built, in part, on low-lying land, some of it reclaimed, could suffer a similar fate in the future, bereft as it is of even the imperfect protection that New Orleans had.
Asked whether he would build or purchase a house in Portmore, he responded with scientific deliberation: "The inter-governmental panel on climate change gives a bottom and a top end of the range of estimates and the sea level rise could be as little as 15 centimetres over the course of a century, but it could be as much as a metre. On balance, the evidence suggests that the sea level will be more towards the top end of the range. So if you come to that conclusion I think you would have to decide that you would not make that investment."
READ MORE IN NEWS SECTION - 'Portmore could be next New Orleans'
