NEGRIL, Westmoreland – In the past five years, Negril’s coastal waters have reclaimed an estimated 30 feet or 9.14 metres of beach where tourists frolick, with the sea edging even closer to hotel properties and the roadway that runs parallel to the shore.

Even more of the pristine white sand has been eaten away by big storms that have pummeled Jamaica since July.

Now, having talked about the problem for more than a decade, the resort town is getting angry at the inaction and more fearful of the commercial implications – no beach, no tourism.

But increasingly, properties are also at risk of damage.

The battered coral reefs no longer provide the buffer they once did. Last month, huge waves built and crashed unto hotels and beachfront shops, depositing sand, water and debris.

On average, some six feet or a near two metres of beach erodes in Negril per year.

So last week, resolute about the need to stop their investments from washing out to sea, the chamber president vowed that business owners in the resort would now accept nothing but action – the Negril business community having four years ago taken the lead in designing a plan to save the beaches.

“No more talk,” insisted hotelier Wayne Cummings, who is both general manager of the Negril Gardens Hotel and president of the Negril Chamber of Commerce, the voice of businesses in the resort.

“Now it’s time for action. When we lose the hotels and the business that people expect of us, it is going to be too late,” said Cummings.

The resort’s political representative, Dr Wykeham McNeill, who is also the junior minister for tourism, responded to the urgency of his constituents by promising even more talk.

“I have called a meeting for next week with the various stakeholders in an effort to arrive at a consensus on how to reclaim the beach,” said McNeill, whose Western Westmoreland constituency encapsulates the bottom portion of Negril.

“Some people have ideas how to reclaim the beach, but we want to put all the sides together and begin to carry out the work. The real issue is to come to a consensus and maybe we need to do some further studies and come to an agreement and then decide what to do.”

The good news, he added, “is that we all agree that something must be done.”

But the agreement to act is four years old, reached back in November 2001 after the devastation of another storm, Michelle. It was Sylvie Grizzle, Negril chamber environment committee chairman, who had sounded the alarm then.

One year later, in 2002, a combined committee of the chamber, the local Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association chapter, the 15-year-old Negril Coral Reef Preservation Society and the Negril Environmental Area Protection Trust drafted a plan outlining a remedial course of action.

The plan is yet to be implemented, and the sand continues to erode.

Negril’s seven mile stretch of beach has been a selling point for the resort for decades.

A search of the Jamaica Tourist Board website offered up 80 hits of hospitality properties in Negril, whose business are dependent on the lazy, laid back, sun-soaked paradise that the resort town’s beaches represent to the overseas market.

But, overtime, a lack of regulatory rigour has seen the development of semi-permanent and permanent structures on the beach, and land-based pollutants entering the waterway, poisoning the coral reefs.

“If the beach continues to recede at the rate it is presently, we are going to be out of business,” said Cummings.

“In any sensible resort town where the people depend on the beachfront, the expertise would long have been found and the necessary corrective measures put in place.”

Just over a week ago, several hotels in the area reported damage from sea surges on the tail end of Hurricane Wilma that dumped several tonnes of sand and debris on properties.

The 52-room Mariner’s Inn Hotel, for example, which was undergoing a multi -million facelift, was among the properties battered by the high waves. The storm surges swept over the resort’s retaining walls, pavements, rooms, toilets and furniture.

After the rains, work crews worked feverishly on the beaches to clear several tonnes of debris dumped there by the high waves.

As they worked, the signs of recent erosion were glaring and ugly. Large amounts of sand were eaten away, foundations of beach structures were exposed, several trees teetered on semi-exposed roots, and concrete sat precariously atop sand.

NCRPS project manager Carl Hanson says much of the destruction of the reefs in Negril has contributed significantly to the erosion of the beach.

“If the reefs are damaged then the physical protection that they normally give to the shoreline will be lost,” he said.

Storms he pointed out, from time to time cause damage to reefs but added that human beings have also contributed to their destruction.

Shoreline protection offered by natural reefs saves Caribbean countries between US$700 million and US$2.2 billion annually, marine economists estimate, but researchers have indicated that commercial activity could erode hundreds of millions of that value each year if sufficient care is not taken to police the marine environment.

The region’s coral reefs span an estimated 26,000 kilometres, which environmentalists say help to dissipates wave and storm energy when hurricanes approach Florida and the Caribbean.

In Negril, the NCRPS has implemented several measures to protect the reefs .

“We have installed swimming markers to protect the swimmers, we have installed buoys on the reefs for boats to anchor and have been monitoring the health of the coral reefs by carrying out studies and analysing the water quality,” Hanson noted.

After Hurricane Michelle, then water and housing minister Dr Karl Blythe said that the government was considering the erection of barrier reefs just off the coastline to minimise the impact of high waves.

Hanson, however, is not convinced that artificial reefs would be the most effective response.

“Barrier reefs could be an option, but I am not sure if it is the best. If they are erected, it could become dangerous to do boating, especially at night,” said the environmentalist. “I am not really in support of it.”

He is more inclined to support land-based solutions – such as improved water quality, education programmes, regulating construction to ensure that no one builds too close to the shoreline, and ‘proper cleaning’ of the beach.

McNeill in the meantime, while agreeing that action was needed, is not sure what should be done.

“It may be that we will have to do some pumping of sand, but do we pump it before the reefs or behind the reefs or do we put up groins? All of this has to be studied and discussed,” the juniour tourism minister said.

But Cummings is impatient and wants government to provide funding to address the matter urgently.

“Whatever it takes to correct the erosion of the beach will be peanuts, bearing in mind the serious economic impact the degradation of the beach will have on the economy of the parishes of Westmoreland and Hanover,” said the hotelier.

The tourism sector, the island’s largest foreign exchange earner, provides employment for thousands of persons in the parishes of Hanover and Westmoreland.

Negril straddles both parishes

“Everything in Negril revolves around tourism and I have absolutely no doubt that if the beach continues to be eroded the sector will be wiped out,” said Cummings

cummingsm@jamaicaobserver.com