WITH old tyres sourced form the Riverton Landfill, residents of Melbrook in Harbour View are building themselves two retaining walls to guard against flooding and land slippages which have plagued their community for years.

For the next five weeks, they will be stacking, tying and filling about 5,000 tyres with soil as part of the Management of Slope Stabilisation in Communities (MoSSaiC) pilot project funded by the World Bank and implemented by the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management (ODPEM).

The first wall, ODPEM explained, is to be used for road protection at the top of the landslide and will be 20 metres long, two metres wide, and three metres high. The second, to be constructed at the base of landslide, will have a length of 28 metres, a width of three metres, and a height of four metres.

Explaining the rationale for the pilot, the agency said traditional engineering methods for mitigating landslides using reinforced concrete and cut-stone retaining walls have proven to be a significant cost to the country. As such, it has turned to what it describes as micro-mitigation projects which employ low-cost methodologies.

In an emailed response to questions posed by the Jamaica Observer yesterday, ODPEM’s research analyst Christopher Gayle of the Mitigation, Planning and Research Division, said the Melbrook project served two purposes.

“The Melbrook Heights tyre soil retaining wall pilot implementation represents an excellent case study in the building of disaster resilience at the local scale utilising new low-cost methodologies while at the same time reducing the harmful effects of unwanted used tyres on our natural environment,” he said.

“Strategically, the aim is for the methodology to be replicated nationally across other communities and critical infrastructure, which are vulnerable to landslide hazards, the ultimate aim being the further reduction of Jamaica’s Risk to Landslide Hazard,” he continued.

In addition to that, the objective of the project is to foster knowledge transfer to the ODPEM and its partners to master the technique of constructing tyresoil retaining walls by June 2013.

The MoSSaiC methodology was developed by a team of researchers from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom — Professor Malcolm Anderson and Dr Elizabeth Holcombe. The low-cost landslide mitigation strategy is part of a number of initiatives the World Bank is financing under the Comunity-Based Landslide Risk Reduction Project (CBLRRP).

Speaking to the reliability of the structures, ODPEM said the tyre/soil technique has been used “in over 1000 structures worldwide, in countries such as France, the United States, Martinique, Japan and Algeria”.

The project was born out of a partnership agreement between Jamaica and Martinique, signed in December, 2012 with a view to promoting the exchange of information, knowledge, and practices between experts and existing operational units.

Members of the community were trained in implementation techniques by a Martiniquan delegation. The project is expected to be completed by May 24.