PORTMORE, BUILT just outside of Kingston, across Hunts Bay, in southern St. Catherine, began as a small housing development in the 1960s. It has since grown to 55,000 houses and an estimated quarter of a million people, the latter figure put forward by Mayor George Lee. (The disputed 2002 population census put the figure at 172,000).Evacuating that population ahead of the arrival of a catastrophic storm is one of the mayor's greatest concerns. "I spend many sleepless nights worrying about how we would get so many people out of here in time, especially with some people continuing to ignore evacuation notices when these are issued", he told The Sunday Gleaner.
That reluctance to obey evacuation orders, according to Minister of Land and Environment, Dean Peart, is a matter that he intends to deal with decisively through the force of legislation. "It is one of the items that I will be taking to Cabinet on Monday morning, so that we can fast-track the bill authorising forced evacuation of communities threatened by natural disasters," he disclosed.
Such evacuations may be the only real option open to Portmore, as, according to Peart, the Government will not even pretend that it has the resources to build the defences required.
The UWI's Professor Clayton confirmed that such defensive measures would be very expensive. "We can build sea defences between the settlement and the sea but then we have to think about sea level rise affecting significant areas of coastline. We're going to have to decide which areas we're going to protect and which we're going to regard as more expendable," he suggested.
LET'S NOT KID OURSELVES
"There is no way that we could afford to build those protective systems to resist a Category Five hurricane; let's not kid ourselves!" the minister candidly asserted.
The plan, he said, was therefore, to focus on smaller drainage systems that can combat smaller storms, not only in Portmore, but islandwide, while coming up with effective evacuation plans for the catastrophic events.
In the meantime, Professor Clayton's warning about housing density in Portmore may have come too late, as, according to Mayor Lee, much of the land space has been exhausted. The two small schemes currently under way off the Braeton Parkway one of 75 units and the other at just over 200 units are, the mayor, promises, the final housing developments that will be approved in Portmore. The one exception to that, he told The Sunday Gleaner, could be in lower-density Hellshire, where the available land is under the control of the Urban Development Corporation (UDC).
Peart is also promising that his ministry will not be granting any further housing approvals for Portmore proper.
Natalie Campbell Rodriques, minority leader in the Portmore Municipal Council, is asking the Government to "put that commitment in writing."
"We were told that the (10,000 units) Greater Portmore development, would have been the last housing project in the area, but that turned out not to be the case," she said.
The moratorium on further housing development was badly needed, not only because of the threat of natural disasters, she argued, but also because of what she said was likely shortage of potable water in the future. Furthermore, Councillor Rodriques, warned, with the close proximity of most Portmore houses to each other, "I fear that infectious diseases that follow a major catastrophe, akin to the New Orleans situation, could spread rapidly throughout the community."
