Road collapses in White Hall, St Mary
White Hall, St Mary – A section of the main road in this St Mary district leading to Islington collapsed early Saturday morning cutting off vehicular traffic and leaving some residents of the area concerned about their safety.
“It gone right cross, way to all my home. I don’t know if I am going to lose my house if the rain continues to fall,” said Claudette Morgan, a resident whose house is a mere 20 metres from the affected roadway.
Morgan, who has lived in the area since childhood, said she had never seen anything like it before.
The effect of the earth slippage, which was not limited to the roadway but stretched to nearby homes, resembled that of an earthquake, as the road is broken in several areas, leaving huge, rippling gaps in sections of the surface that did not fall away altogether. The road surface is now nearly 20 feet deep.
Several utility poles were left dangling close to the ground, posing a safety hazard to residents.
“It happened at about 2:30 Saturday morning,” Morgan recalled. “We just heard the place just make a sound and when we got up in the morning and came out we saw the place gone right down.”
The collapse came after continuous heavy showers that lashed sections of St Mary and St Ann over two days last week, leaving several roads flooded and forcing traffic pile ups for hours in some instances in St Ann. A section of the roadway leading from St Ann’s Bay to Lime Hall was also reportedly cut in two.
Mayor of Port Maria, Councillor Robert Montague, said the affected roadway had sunk about 20 feet and was about 70 feet in length. It was seriously hampering traffic flow between the major towns of Port Maria and Annotto Bay in the parish and between Port Maria and Kingston.
The sunken roadway lies in a watershed area of the parish but there is no river in close proximity to the affected area, leaving residents to speculate as to the reason for the collapse.
One resident from a nearby community who went to videotape the scene, reasoned that there was a hollow section beneath the road surface. He said that it was useless to rebuild the road in that area.
Yesterday, scores of persons, mostly from surrounding communities, were on the scene to get a first-hand view of the devastated area.
