DESPERATE to stave off the devastating effects a heavy shower of rain could have on Treasure Beach, the Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association (JHTA) has called on the National Works Agency (NWA) to complete the canal being constructed so as to prevent flooding in the area.

With the community home to several small hotel properties and hundreds of residents who rely on them to eke out a living, the JHTA said the time to act was now.

“You can’t ignore safety as a standard that must be achieved. How can you have canals and roads that have been out of order for years, two years. Were it Montego Bay, it would have been fixed in a week. The fact is that the south coast has been long ignored,” Wayne Cummings, president of the JHTA, told the Sunday Observer yesterday.

Judy Schoenbein, area chairman for the JHTA South Coast region, said it was a disgrace that the canal should have been left largely unattended since construction began two years ago.

“There is absolutely no way that anybody would ever build a canal behind a Palmyra or a Half Moon or a Ritz or a Sandals hotel and leave it within steps of their back door so that when it overflows, its coming straight through their lobby and not being washed out to sea. That just would never happen,” noted the southern area representative.

But Stephen Shaw, communications and customer service manager with the NWA, hit back, saying that they were not being overlooked. Instead, he said the reality was that the project was not only costly but one that had to be undertaken in phases.

The project has been taking some time (but) it is not that we have held up the thing. We didn’t want to just create something without properly accomplishing what we set out to do,” he said, adding that there had also been issues over land acquisition.

“The persons who owned the property were asking for an exorbitant amount and we had to go through the commissioner of lands to get evaluations and so on,” he said.

Cummings was, however, insistent that the canal needed to be completed in order to avoid future loss of life and or property in the event of flood rains.

“The canal was conceptualised when people had lost their houses. lost lives. It was so topical that every minister, who was worth their salt, was down here. So they came and dug up the place and that’s that,” he said. “The canal will be finished though when we lose 10 people and another couple of houses fall into the sea. We would just like for that not to happen.”

Beyond the length of time it was taking to complete the project, however, Schoenbein said there were concerns over whether the canal would fulfill the function it is being designed to do.

“We had no idea that they were going to come along and build a gigantic thing, and then on top of that, it is not even functioning because it has not taken the water out of the pond. That water is still backed up, and in fact it is worse than it was before,” she said.

But Shaw refuted her claim, saying that the canal was intended not to drain the pond but to facilitate the run off of excess water in times of rain. It is a function, he said, that the canal – dug out as it has been under phase one of the project which is valued at $16 million – has performed.

“I am not sure what the JHTA is about. I got a letter to that effect some weeks ago and that was responded to. We went there and if we had not done what we have done down there so far, a lot of persons would have suffered I am sure – not only in the passage of Dean, but during the many other rain events we have had,” he said. “That is what we are about. The channel has been defined, and we have completed one of the two bridges in the event of flood waters coming down to take the overflowing water coming.”

Schoenbein was also concerned that the yet unpaved canal would undermine the foundation of hotels, such as Mar Blue and Seaside Villa in the event of rains. She also expressed doubts about the strength of the bridge.

Shaw, however, dismissed the concerns. “We have many channels around the island that earth drain. This particular one is not going to be an earth drain. It is going to be a paved drain,” he said. “The bridge is structurally sound.”

At the same time, he said had consistently been information on the status of the project.

“There has not been a shortage of information in Treasure Beach. I have gone there several times and spoken to the people down there. Some of the very people down there have been rude, but we have taken on their concerns. The project is ongoing,” he said. “We have a contract out for the construction of a second bridge that we intend to do. We are going to have it completed and we said from day one that this project was going to be implemented on a phased basis.”