ROARING RIVER, Westmoreland – The Westmoreland Parish Council is proceeding with its plans to relocate several residents of Roaring River who are suspected of contaminating the parish’s main water source, even though Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller has not yet responded to a request from residents that they be allowed to stay.

The parish council has, in the meantime, gone ahead and submitted an application to the National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) for approval for the lands, earmarked for the relocation of the residents, to be subdivided.

However, the residents are adamant that they will not move, saying the approximately 1,000 people who live on the Roaring River property are not squatters.

“.There is no pollution of the groundwater here in Roaring River,” insisted Gregory Scott, secretary of the Roaring River Citizens Association. The residents in their area, he added, were either bonafide landowners or tenants.

The residents have the support of Trevor Mutchette, the People’s National Party’s (PNP) candidate for the Petersfield division.

“I am totally against the relocation,” Mutchette told the Observer. “The people have worked out an alternative that would allow them to remain on their land.”

Yesterday, Robert Pickersgill, the transport, works and housing minister, said he was aware that the residents had submitted a letter to the prime minister, seeking her intervention in the matter, but was unaware of the details.

“I’ve heard of it but I don’t know about the details,” Pickersgill said of the May 17 letter which was hand-delivered to the prime minister on nomination day for the Eastern Westmoreland by-election.

The letter outlined a proposal for the establishment of a sewerage treatment plant in the area, or alternatively, the upgrading of the nearby Shewsbury plant. If implemented, the residents said, it would, among other interventions, allow them to remain on the land and eliminate any threat to the water supply.

Former junior minister Harry Douglas said last year that as soon as the subdivisions were approved the Roaring River residents would be expected to enter into negotiations with the water and housing ministry for the construction of their housing.

Approximately 55 acres of land in the Roaring River area had been identified to relocate what was said to be more than 300 squatters.

Plans to relocate the residents from the area, home to the Roaring River TPDCo tourist attraction, were fast tracked after typhoid, a water-borne disease, surfaced in the area. It was believed that unsanitary living conditions of the squatters were contaminating the Roaring River and its watershed, the parish’s main source of potable water.