It’s been a week since a flood of muddy water inundated the seaside north coast town of Port Maria, but even though the water has run off, everything still smells mouldy.

And with rain falling on and off all of last week, everything is still wet and covered with a sticky film of mud, remnants of the debris and sediment that washed through when water from the Othrum River spilled into the town.

Dark, angry cloud hovered over the coastal town last week as business owners and residents tried to pick up the pieces of their soggy and muddied lives and livelihoods.

“Vex? I more than vex. I don’t even know where to start,” said a visibly enraged Michael Thomas, a lifelong resident of Port Maria whose house was ruined when the water flowed in, leaving his furniture and appliances ruined, his home muddied and dirty. “Is somebody I know feel sorry for me and give me these,” he said, tugging on the clothes he was wearing.

Thomas’ situation is not much different from that of hundreds people who live and work in and around Port Maria, which two weeks ago bore the brunt of flash floods that accompanied the unusually heavy rains. And like many others in the town, he’s pointing to incompetence as the reason for his suffering.

“This one is not God’s fault, this was a man-made catastrophe,” he added, hissing his teeth in annoyance.

Two Thursdays ago, as a weather system that passed over Jamaica brought several days of continuous rain, the Othrum River, which runs through the western end of Port Maria, like many other rivers in affected north coast parishes, became swollen. What happened next, however, was highly unusual, even for a town that lies below sea level and is bordered by two rivers – the Pagee to the east and the Othrum to the west – with the Caribbean Sea to the north.

Late that afternoon, following several hours of continuous rain, people in the town started noticing that the Othrum was topping its banks north of a bridge recently constructed over the river.

“It did rain nuff still, but what happened was that a whole lot of garbage and what not started backing up behind the new bridge, and when the water came down there was nowhere for it to go but into the town,” explained a Port Maria resident waiting at the town’s main bus stop.

Stennett Street, one of the worst-affected areas in the small town, is Port Maria’s main thoroughfare, and runs parallel to the Othrum, which flows through the western section of the town. For years, the river was traversed by a single-lane bridge, but with the coming of the North Coast Highway, which aims to improve the connection from Montego Bay to Port Antonio via the parishes of Trelawny, St Ann and St Mary, a new bridge was built several metres upstream of the original bridge.

That bridge, opened just weeks before, has a noticeably reduced free board – space underneath the bridge for the river to flow through – than the old bridge did. The new bridge is also built sloping from the Othrum’s west bank to the east, and unlike the old bridge, has no arch in the centre.

It’s the new bridge, say residents, that has caused all the problems.

“The bridge build too low. Anybody can see that,” said a Port Maria resident who gave his name only as Aristide. “Yuh no see seh dem build di bridge inna di river!”

“How if you have a bridge a run over a river for years and years and nothing ever do it, you are going to build a new bridge to replace it, and you build that one lower than the first one? Me is not no engineer, me nuh buil’ road.

But even a blind man can see that what dem do is foolishness!” added a passerby upon overhearing the conversation.

With the bridge acting as a dam of sorts, the water from the river at first snaked through the town’s drains and gullies, then spread to the streets and soon began to rise more, seeping under doors. It was quick but catastrophic, and caught many people by surprise.

“It took about five minutes or so from the time the water started coming in to the point where it was chest high,” said Sylvia Edwards, who owns Edwards Wholesale and Retail Liquor, a family-run business located at 6 Stennett Street.

“We couldn’t even get time to shut the door. All of a sudden we were watching goods flow through the door, the fridges started floating inside the store, and even the car we had parked outside was washed away,” recounted Edwards. The damage at that store, said Edwards, amounted to upwards of $8 million.

Since last week, they’ve had to turn away five deliveries, as they aren’t yet through with clearing the storerooms of soggy goods and debris.

“We nuh have the first cent to restock, ’cause most of the goods we got for the Christmas on 30-day credit,” explained Edwards’ son, Leon. The car, explained the Edwards, was insured. The business was not.

Inside the S&S Variety Store, also on Stennett Street, the store’s owners and staff were forced to scramble onto the roof as they watched the store fill with water.

“If people were not proactive I think a lot of lives would have been lost. For instance, if we never got out and onto the roof, I don’t know what would have happened,” said Stanley Stanford, the owner of the store, which sells cell phones and accessories, toiletries, household items and offers printing fax and photocopy services.

“We had to dump all our stock, the fridge turn over, and everything inside got wet,” added Stanford, who puts his losses conservatively in the region of $1.2 million.

Further down the street, at the Mizpah Furniture store, a collection of brand-new heavy appliances, including fridges, washing machines and stoves, stood in the front of the store, while workers in the back diligently continued to wipe mud off the wood furniture.

“We don’t know if they are working, because the electrician is still to come, but our furniture will be okay, because they are made from real wood, not bagasse,” said Colin, the store assistant, in reference to the electrical appliances.

Anthony Scott, who operates the Garden and Farm supply store in Manning’s Plaza, located perpendicular to Stennett Street at the seaward end of the town, is another businessman whose livelihood has been affected by the flood. He lost 500 chicks and about $3 million in stock, and would have lost his motor vehicle too, if he hadn’t ventured out into the raging muddy waters to tie it to the building with a rope. Now, he’s wondering where the money to start over will come from.

“We just draw 500 bags of feed that day, and it’s all gone. And this was no act of God, so who is going to pay us? We now have to make arrangement with bank to get money with big interest… lawd,” he sighed in exasperation.

The damage done in minutes will end up costing millions, and now, like Scott, the people of Port Maria are wondering who to hold responsible.

“We a go sue!” declared an angry Leon Edwards. “When you go back a town find out fi me who we must sue, because this can’t go so!” he asked this reporter.

The St Mary Parish Council, the local government body, said it cannot be held responsible, as the council was sidelined for the majority of the planning and building phases, and was ignored when it raised objections to the bridge’s construction.

“We had meetings with the NWA, but it took years for us to get the drawings from them, and we really didn’t know until the fence was removed after construction, how low the bridge was,” said director of planning at the parish council Kerry Chambers.

It’s not just the council that objected. Days after being opened, the residents themselves called in television news cameras to bring attention to the situation.

Mayor of Port Maria, Bobby Montague, who just days before the flood famously bragged that Ray Nagin, the visiting mayor of the New Orleans – the US city that was submerged during Hurricane Katrina – “could come and learn a thing or two from Port Maria” as it regards flood prevention, was only slightly humbled by the disaster.

Montague insisted that the parish council did it’s job of keeping drains and gullies clean and of providing immediate disaster management.

“We were kept out of it, and when they did inform us, we objected, but the National Works Agency told us that it would be okay, even though the contractor also objected to the bridge’s design, but the workers were instructed to proceed,” Montague told the Sunday Observer.

But the National Works Agency (NWA), the government body mandated to oversee road construction, also threw its hands up, insisting that it was neither directly or indirectly responsible for the flooding, even though it admitted that the bridge was built too low.

“We are not accepting that the bridge was the source of flooding,” NWA communication and customer services manager Stephen Shaw told the Sunday Observer. “The bridge is low, and we accept that, and it could have been responsible for some water going into the town, but to say the bridge is the reason for the flooding is certainly a gross exaggeration.”

The NWA he said, employed the British consultancy firm Nicholas O Dwyer, the current project managers for that leg of the North Coast Highway, and was advised that the bridge would be fine.

“In terms of structure, there is nothing wrong with the bridge,” a defensive Shaw continued to argue. The flooding, he said, was primarily the result of the heavy rainfall, which he called “a one-in-100-year event”, resulting in over 300 mm of rainfall over two days, causing the river channel to be breached in a number of areas, but also because of the garbage and debris dumped into the river channel by nearby residents.

But Shaw’s claims have been rubbished by Mayor Montague, who pointed out that the amount of rainfall was nothing new to the area.

“On November 27, 2005, 190 mm of rain fell in Port Maria, and while the Pagee River overflowed its banks, it didn’t flood the town,” the Mayor thundered. “On November 23, 2006, 175 mm of rain fell, and the Pagee didn’t overflow, but the town got flooded. What’s different? That bridge!”

Amidst the bickering, emergency aid is finally arriving in Port Maria, and last Wednesday, residents’ concerns were somewhat assuaged by the appearance of Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller, who was both heckled and cheered as she and other Government officials took a first-hand look at the damage.

But that’s little comfort to the 600 or so families and business owners left high and dry as a result of the flood.

“Now I know how the people of New Orleans felt,” said Sylvia Edwards, recounting how she, last year on a visit to her sister in that American city, was evacuated just the day before the devastating Hurricane Katrina struck.

Stanley Stanford concurred.

“St Mary is a forgotten parish,” he complained. “People from the Government come, but they only look at the bridge, nobody ask us how we’re doing or how we’re going to survive. It’s as if we are not part of Jamaica.”

campbello@jamaicaobserver.com