PORT MARIA, St Mary — A massive flood here last week has reignited concerns about the proposed location for the new St Mary Police divisional headquarters, and has left law enforcers struggling to fully recover from the damage inflicted at the current building.

Head of the St Mary Police Division, Superintendent Bobette Morgan-Simpson, said efforts are still being made to salvage damaged files and have mud removed from the parking lot at the rented premises that the police currently occupy.

“We have lost a number of documents, even though documents were placed high when we saw the rain falling so hard and then we could see the roads were flooding. We lifted stuff high, but we didn’t expect the water would have been so high in the station,” she explained.

“There were files in some of the cabinets that were actually flooded and have been damaged. We have been ‘sunning’ some of the stuff that we can sun. Some of them are just totally gone. We also lost furniture, desks, computer and other items because the water was pretty high in the station,” Morgan-Simpson disclosed Thursday during the first meeting of the St Mary Municipal Corporation since the February 1 flood.

She requested help from the corporation and thanked the Jamaica Fire Brigade for the assistance it had given with the clean-up.

“The entire ground floor of the station was inundated with water and mud. It took us about three days to get rid of the mud and the water that covered the area,” she recounted.

The privately owned building that currently houses the St Mary Police headquarters is located beside the sea on Port Maria’s Main Street. Across the road, the Government intends to build a brand new base for the parish’s cops.

The long-delayed construction was scheduled to commence in June, Morgan-Simpson recently revealed. However, uncertainty now surrounds that date due to the severe flooding of the proposed site last week.

“That area was totally inundated with water,” Morgan-Simpson noted on Thursday. She explained that the flood waters were so strong at the site, they caused a large metal container there to shift about 90 degrees from its original location.

Morgan-Simpson, this week, communicated her observation regarding the flood to the National Housing Trust and the Ministry of National Security, which are both tasked with building the new station.

“There is also now discussion as to whether it is the correct place to place the new station,” Morgan-Simpson said. “The time frame for the start of the new station was slated for the end of June and at this point there isn’t any shifting of the date, but I am not so sure what is going to happen later on… There is another meeting for two weeks’ time, so by then we should be able to know exactly what the situation is.”

In the meantime, president of the St Mary Chamber of Commerce Fredrick Young cautioned the authorities to take last week’s flood into consideration in relation to the location or construction of the proposed divisional headquarters.

“They may have to look at how the station is put in terms of height from ground level because it wouldn’t make sense to build a new station that is flooded out the first time rain falls. It needs to be looked at even more carefully with this flooding experience that we had last week,” Young told the Jamaica Observer.

He said he does not expect the authorities to renege on their promise to build the new station in Port Maria, adding that the chamber is still willing to assist with storage of material and housing for workers on the impending project.

The Ministry of National Security recently stated that there are major changes to the initial design of the new facility, but it gave an assurance that the planned structure will not be downsized.

Citing problems with soil at the proposed site, the ministry said it intends to build a two-storey structure instead of the four storeys initially planned.

“It just won’t have the height. So, it will be spread over more land area,” consultant to the ministry Paul Clarke recently told the Observer.