Golden Grove provides safe haven for Portlanders hemmed in by floodwaters

SPENDING THURSDAY night trapped between floodwaters in her vehicle in Golden Grove, St Thomas, with her four-year-old child was not something Tiffany Sobah anticipated.

The bank teller was travelling from Morant Bay in the parish to her home in Portland, and was hoping to beat the heavy rains affecting the island.

Although she said she kept abreast of the road conditions and alternative routes, the extensive flooding that she encountered in Golden Grove caught her off guard.

“We got here and we realised there’s a line of vehicles parked up. We just decided that we weren’t going to try the water,” she told The Gleaner.

For much of Friday, Jamaica was under a tropical storm watch, with flash flood warning effected for low-lying and flood-prone areas of the southern and eastern parishes.

“After we stayed out here for about two hours, we realised the water started rising and the rain wasn’t stopping. So it was not coming off the road, so we decide to dress back a little, most of us were awake up to two in the morning. The rain was pouring heavy this morning so we went into the vehicle, fell asleep, got up in the after four and realise the water was coming all the way down,” she said.

Sobah was one of the many motorists who were hedged in by the floodwaters that resulted from the Plantain Garden and Golden Grove rivers overflowing their banks.

“When we wake up this morning, we were enclosed. We neither can go to Morant Bay or Portland!” exclaimed Elimina Plowright Harris, who was returning home to Portland from her daughter’s graduation in Kingston.

“It was an awful experience, when night come, you have to be thinking what is going to happen in the night if the rain is going to come down more, or if it is going to flood and cover us all here. So we have to be thinking hard about that, very hard about that situation,” she added.

And the water did get higher in the night. Luckily, Abraham Gray, a resident of the area, gave access to an open land adjacent to his home so that the motorists could park and escape the rising floodwaters.

“You have to help people when you can, when they are in distress and trouble.” he told The Gleaner.

“We were grateful for that because we don’t know what was going to happen next,” Plowright Harris chimed in.

The kindness extended by residents was something that Chante Gordon, another motorist who had to sleep in her vehicle on Thursday night, experienced as well. She said this made the distressing situation more bearable. She told The Gleaner that some shop owners kept their doors open and even provided them with food and dry clothes in the night.

“We were not alone, residents have been very accommodating,” she stated.

Drain cleaning

Ian Gallab, a resident of the area, noted that the town is flood prone. However, he said this can be minimised with more frequent drain cleaning.

“The gullies nuh keep clean. The rivers bring the water from up in the hills, so the gullies keep back the water, but [because] it nah keep clean, the water overflow pon di road,” he said.

“In order for them to have free flow of water, if they’re going to clean the drains at the entrance, they have to go all the way down close to Holland Bay where the water goes out into the sea, so you cannot clean here and not there, because debris is going to block that end,” Gordon chimed in.

However, St Thomas Eastern Member of Parliament Dr Michelle Charles, who eventually came on-site, told The Gleaner that drain cleaning was done in the town on June 26.

“We’ve done at least six or seven areas. Unfortunately, because the soil is still very soft, as soon as we clear a land slippage, it slips again,” Charles said. “We did a lot of drain cleaning, we prepared for this.”

Elsewhere in the parish, landslides and falling trees rendered some roads impassable. The main road from Bowden to Old Pera Road was blocked by a landslide. However, it was subsequently cleared by a backhoe tractor.

Heavy rains also washed away a makeshift bridge in Llandewey and marooned residents.

sashana.small@gleanerjm.com