Editorial | Sandy Gully and more

Anthony Hylton’s claim last week that the lower reaches of Kingston’s Sandy Gully is in danger of failing, with potential loss of life and property, is deeply worrying.

But the concerns of Mr Hylton, a member of Parliament, whose constituency includes communities adjacent to the gully, should not be confined to only that bit of critical infrastructure. It also raises questions about the status of the master plan for the drainage of the capital region which, five years ago, Prime Minister Andrew Holness said his government had in hand.

The next step would be the actual design of the system.

“We have done the request for proposal for a drainage design for Kingston and St Andrew,” Mr Holness told Parliament in September 2019. “Hopefully, they will go to contracting within a month ... We will have that (designs) ready in terms of the major drains that will have to be reconstructed or new drains to be put in ... .”

Building out the new drainage system, Mr Holness said, would cost up to US$150 million. Among the major beneficiaries would be lower St Andrew, including some of the areas for which Mr Hylton is fearful, given his claims about the condition of Sandy Gully.

First, there is no question that the Kingston and St Andrew capital district, where more than a fifth of the Jamaican population lives, faces an acute infrastructure crisis, especially poor roads and an overburdened drainage system.

But Mr Hylton’s claims about Sandy Gully, and the danger it poses to certain communities, in his contribution to the State of the Constituencies Debate, demand a statement by government engineers on whether his concerns are well founded or overly alarming.

“The walls of the gully have now been breached, and the community residents are now living in fear for their lives and property,” Mr Hylton said.

LIVE INFORMALLY

The fact is that in the areas identified by Mr Hylton, mostly blighted urban communities, many people live informally on the banks of the paved gully. But even in some of the capital’s choice neighbourhoods, some homes back onto gullies, which would also be problematic for these homeowners if the drains were compromised. Several factories, particularly in the lower St Andrew industrial belt, are also adjacent to gullies. So, it is not only residents of inner-city communities who lose much if the capital’s gully system fails.

Sandy Gully, the largest, and 10 others that form the Kingston gully system, are the backbone of the drainage of the capital, which sits on the Liguanea Plain, overlooked by hills in the east and to the north.

About six miles long and linked to a series of drains, the concrete gully was deemed necessary because of Kingston’s ongoing problem with flooding despite the concreting of natural gully courses, beginning in the 1950s. It starts in the foothills of St Andrew in the east and winds its way through several communities to the sea. Construction started in 1963, and the system’s entire buildout required nearly a decade.

The Jamaican Government’s annual report for 1960 said about the plan to build Sandy Gully: “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 and enlarged to take care of the surface water and the problem of guiding it to 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.

“The engineering problems are as follows. The main gully course from the foothills to the marshy lands just short of the harbour should be concreted over the total length, with an invert width varying from 100 ft to 250 ft and with side walls 16 ft high.”

The estimate was that the gully would cost between £3 million and £4 million to build and take three to four years to complete.

INCREASED RUN-OFF

The gully system has performed well, but the continued expansion of the city into the hillsides and more paved areas have increased run-off. The drainage system is now inadequate to handle the volume of water, especially with the increased frequency of extreme weather events. The problems have been exacerbated by inadequate maintenance, worsened by limited fiscal space within which the government has had to operate. It has been a decade and half, after damage by a major storm, that Sandy Gully has undergone substantial maintenance. And as Mr Hylton and others have observed, Sandy Gully, and the others, are showing their wear.

It would be timely, in the circumstance, for Mr Holness, with his government now about to launch a major road rehabilitation project, to specifically address the problems of drainage. Without proper drains, the gains from repairing roads will soon be lost.

Indeed, the discussion must include a strategy for funding the rehabilitation and hardening of the island’s infrastructure, given the limited spending on them over the past decade and the threats they now face from the effects of climate change.