FALMOUTH, Trelawny – All eyes are on a one-month-old committee set up to stop the flow of sewage that sometimes runs along the streets of Falmouth, creating what one government minister has described as a “toxic environment’.

During a recent tour of the fledgling resort town, Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett did not hold back when commenting on the unmistakable stench of human waste wafting in the air.

“You can’t have Jamaicans moving around in the town trying to peddle their wares, trying to make a living with a toxic environment. And I could barely, you know to use a Jamaican phrase, stand me breath, you know that term? Yes, I could barely stand my breath today. That’s untenable!” Bartlett scolded.

“The sewage problem in Falmouth has to be dealt with. And I am going to drive that force as much as we can to make sure that it is dealt with. Today it was almost intolerable,” Bartlett said during a tour of the town, part of an islandwide effort by his ministry and its public bodies to boost its destination assurance programme.

When contacted for a response, the town’s mayor and chairman of the Trelawny Municipal Corporation (TMC), Councillor C Junior Gager, said efforts were ongoing to address the issue.

“There is a problem with sewage in Falmouth,” the mayor conceded.

“A committee, comprising government ministers and representatives of the Port Authority, has been put in place to meet once a week, looking at all different ways to address the matter,” he told the Jamaica Observer.

Falmouth is among towns across the country tipped to become vibrant resort centres. However, the absence of an effective and efficient sewerage system is holding it back.

“We have blueprints from way back to do an expansion of the place but we can’t do anything. In the absence of a central sewerage system, I cannot expand my business,” said dejected businessman Michael Humphrey.

“Because when you set up the place to accommodate tourists and locals alike, and when you put in shops, you have to have toilets. And when you set up restaurants and the people come and they have to use the bathroom, there is nowhere to put the sewage. Ever so often, you have to call in [a cesspool company] to come pump. It’s just heart-rending and devastating,” he added.

Humphrey told Observer West that he often has to engage the services of septic truck operators to remove sewage from the plaza he operates in the seaside town. Falmouth is below sea level and the theory is that strong waves often disturb its underground sewerage systems.

“The bottom line is that Falmouth is kind of situated on a rock, with water underneath. When the tide is high, the sewage in Falmouth comes up and runs over,” he explained.

He thinks the problem has been exacerbated by construction of the port, which officially opened its doors to cruise ships in 2011 after four years of preparation that included dredging of seabeds.

“As I said from day one, when they were building the port, if they had just set up a sewerage system for the town, we wouldn’t have those problems there,” the popular businessman stated.

The local authority once operated a sewerage pump at the site of the previous Falmouth market. It pumped sewage from that facility and at least one other commercial entity, sending the effluent across town to a treatment plant in Vanzie Land.

However, after the Port Authority of Jamaica acquired the land to develop the cruise shipping pier, a new market was constructed at a different location in Falmouth.

The municipal corporation then made plans to establish a lift station at the corner of Tharpe Street to accommodate 15 households that steadily and bitterly complained of sewage woes. The idea was to pump the sewage to the Vanzie Land facility. But following the commissioning of a survey, it was discovered that 68 households had expressed an interest in connecting to the proposed system.

“We had written to NWC [National Water Commission] to get permission for the 15 but when it then became 68, NWC said they don’t have the space. We were supposed to get the rest of the money from TEF [Tourism Enhancement Fund, an agency within the tourism ministry] to do the pipes and to build the lift station at the corner of Tharpe Street. But after the survey and the costing came to over $100 million, we had no funding to finance that,” Falmouth’s Mayor Gager explained.

“The problem was now bigger than we thought,” he added.