THE tranquility of Doherty Drive, Elletson Flats, St Andrew, belies the unsightly scene lurking in the backyard of householder Lois Lindo. Every time anyone from the townhouses at Golding Circle, Mona, topside the area, uses their bathroom or performs some other household task requiring water, the liquid waste flows downhill and pools on her property.

“Every day, 24 hours of the day, is a sewer system — that means every time somebody takes a shower, wash their hands, use the toilet it’s coming through my yard. Anything you can think of that happens in a bathroom, that happens in a home, comes through here,” Lindo told the Jamaica Observer on Sunday during a visit to her premises.

The 61-year-old plant lover, who lives with her elderly mother, says the problem began in June after National Water Commission (NWC) addressed a sewerage issue affecting the Golding Circle housing development.

“They had a problem back in the scheme and it was running on the main road. The NWC came, and I don’t know what they did, but they don’t have it in the scheme anymore — it’s now in my yard. Their problem was dumped down in my lap,” a frustrated Lindo said.

According to Lindo, a connection to the sewer system — located on the hillsides above her home and which has run through her backyard via a manhole since childhood — has become a terror because it has not been maintained.

“Daddy gave them permission to put [in] the system, to give them connection to the sewer plant in Elletson Flats, but they have never maintained it. I remember as a child, at 12, them building it and I am 61 now and I have never seen them again until this disaster,” she told the Observer.

The householder, who says she has been calling NWC since June to report the issue, told the newspaper that last Friday she had to take action to give herself some temporary respite from the flowing sewage.

“I asked my gardener to dig a trench [in the hillside] to stop the water coming down into the yard. If we didn’t put the trench in Friday we couldn’t stand here,” she said, pointing to the surrounding space.

“If you notice, the grass has two different colours [because] it started to go down there.

“I’ve been calling them from June. They come, they kinda fix it, it clog up back again. The whole of October I’ve been calling and calling and calling [but] nobody comes, and I’ve been frustrated. It is stressing me out because between the stink and the mosquitoes it was just ruining our lives, honestly. It’s out of desperation why I had to dig the trench, because the water was going all over the place,” she added.

Now she says it’s a waiting game to see whether NWC will come to her rescue before the gallons of waste — which are being kept at bay, though barely — flood her yard.

“As you can hear, it’s still running. It was driving me mad that the sewer started to kill off my plants. My snap dragons, all dead; all my little roses, dead. The system is old,” Lindo said.

In 2019 NWC said the Elletson Flats waste water treatment facility and another at Boscobel in St Mary were reconstructed at a value of $620 million.

NWC is the primary provider of waste water or sewerage services in Jamaica, and collects waste water from more than 700,000 people across the island. The entity operates nearly 100 waste water treatment plants islandwide.

Central sewerage systems are located in Kingston and St Andrew, south-east St Catherine (Portmore), Montego Bay in St James, Ocho Rios in St Ann, and Negril in Westmoreland.

In addition, NWC has responsibility for small sewerage systems which are associated with housing developments in various parts of the country.

Raw sewage from the community of Golding Circle, on Golding Avenue in Papine, St Andrew, flows down through these underbrushes into the backyard of householder Lois Lindo, who lives at Doherty Drive in neighbouring Elletson Flats, St Andrew. (Photos: Garfield Robinson)