Your boot only has to sink into the wet, dark mud and you pull your foot from it, as if pulling apart two magnetic surfaces, for you to understand why Laura Reid died from its impact. In the wee hours of last Wednesday morning, Reid was asleep at a friend’s house in Mud Town, when a pile of mud crashed into the side wall of the bedroom, killing her and injuring her child and her pregnant friend.

There is also the gluey grip the mud has on what must be hundreds of tyres packed in to hold the soil, as well as to serve as steps on the steep inclines found in Mud Town.

They know the mud, residents say, and the pile that killed Reid and injured Lorraine Buttler and Reid’s son, simply was not properly packed with tyres, thus facilitating the landslide, which was caused by heavy rains lashing the island since last week.

That aside, though, they say the gruelling nine hours taken to dig out Reid’s body had everything to do with the strength and complexity of the mud.

“Me understand ’bout di mud and tyre,” said Calvin Bennett, one of the residents of Mud Town, who helped to dig Reid’s body from the mound, and rescue Buttler and the child.

“A regular dirt, you know, but when it soggy, you can’t rush wid it, you have to take time and move it slow,” Bennett said.

He and other residents of the St Andrew community, located just above Papine, St Andrew are not unaccustomed to drama. The police have, in the past, said Mud Town was a known stomping ground of the Joel Andem-led Gideon Warriors Gang.

“A cool it a cool now,” one man said of the violence there.

Land slippages are also not new to the people of Mud Town, but this is the first time they have experienced a deadly one, they said.

However, nothing phases their love for the community, with its perfect view of the capital city below. Outside Fabian West’s home, now completely invaded by mud, where Reid and Buttler were sleeping, the gushing of the Hope River is interspersed with the sounds of sirens and vehicles from the city. Long Mountain, with its sprawling houses, the Mona Dam, the wharf – all sights West and others are used to.

“But dis a nuh nutten,” one man said. “Yuh wan si six o’clock a evening, when even if light gone up here, you all right, with the amount of light shining from down there.”

The trek to West’s House conjures up the phrase ‘up, up, up and up we go’, with the hill getting steeper with the turn of each corner, but even above his house, there are other houses, just behind the area of the land slippage.

“The KSAC (Kingston and St Andrew Corporation) asked them to move,” West said, explaining that if the mud continues to tumble down the hill, it would be “hell up here” as the houses located on different incline levels would just roll into each other.

He now has a problem of first sorting his muddy belongings, a lot of which cannot be recovered, and then finding a home for his pregnant girlfriend, Buttler, who is now in hospital.

“Every time I see dis place, mi head hurt me more and more,” West said of the damage to his home.

At the same time, the landslide, and its effects, have left Bennett thinking about community-based response teams for all communities across Jamaica.

His idea is that Jamaicans should be recruited and trained in rescue techniques, since they are familiar with their areas and can be quicker on the scene than the emergency services.

“A nuh all di while you can call pon di Fire Brigade man,” Bennett said. “Any likkle ting weh di man dem [in the community] can do, dem fi help.”

He said in the instance last Wednesday, for example, because of their unfamiliarity with the hilly terrain, the emergency personnel tired quickly. Plus, he said, “You have to know how to deal wid di mud.”