Decoy braces for disaster - Houses ravaged by shifting soil

If the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season brings torrential rainfall, residents of Decoy, St Mary, may have renewed anxiety that houses built almost 50 years ago may continue sliding towards the river.

At least nine houses have been badly damaged by near-seismic earth shifts, and farmlands have been devoured by the river – victim of soil erosion from heavy rainfall.

Tiffany Smith-Black, 32, remembers well the terror of an eerie rumbling – like an earthquake – four years ago. But this was no tremor.

“We was inside the house and we only hear a loud rolling and I feel even the vibrations. When we came out and look, all my backyard go straight roun’ tear weh and gone down inna di river bed,” she said.

Smith-Black suffers with epilepsy, heart disease, and hypertension. With only four and a half feet of backyard left, she is worried about the safety of her three children, who also battle illness. The two older children are asthmatics while their five-year-old sister has haemophilia, a disease that prevents blood from clotting.

“I have wire fencing at the back of my yard so that the kids dem don’t go beyond that border. I put the fence there so they won’t fall over there accidentally,” Smith-Black told The Gleaner.

Sydney Black, unrelated to Smith-Black, bemoaned the loss of his four-bedroom house, which the earth movements have split in two. He said the walls and floor started cracking after flood rains in 2018.

“Mi just see it start to crack up gradually till mi haffi come out of it and go up a mi sista yaad go stay.

“Mi just get up one morning and see the house split inna two,” he said.

In need of refuge, Black, an ice cream vendor, immediately started building a house just less than two feet from the wreckage, where he still stores some furniture.

“None a di room dem nuh finish yet. Mi just a try get some weh fi move inna fi save mi life. Mi nuh have no choice, you know, nuh choice,” said the 80-year-old.

Geologist Professor Simon Mitchell, who has studied damage in Decoy, warns that residents should be relocated because of the community’s vulnerability. Decoy is located 5km (three miles) south of Jeffrey Town.

Based on an assessment carried out by the Department of Geology and Geography at The University of the West Indies (UWI), he believes that the community should be declared unfit for construction.

Soft rocks amid the yellow limestone would put Decoy at serious risk of devastation in the perfect storm, Mitchell, director of the Earthquake Unit, said. Even a small earthquake in the rainy season could spell disaster for residents.

“The big worry would be if they get a large amount of rain. It would seep into the soil and damage the rocks, which will cause a major landslide. If it gets very wet, it may happen immediately,” Mitchell added.