The National Water Commission (NWC) says it has scheduled “an extensive cleaning and desilting exercise” for a sewage pump house in Glendale, St Andrew, which has been clogged, resulting in an overflow of waste water and excrement that has been causing residents discomfort.

The NWC gave the update on Thursday after residents again complained about the stench, inconvenience, and health risk posed.

“The sewage would come to the side of my house, but not the front. It smells awful. I smell it all the time and at nights as well. I moved here maybe three and a half years ago. In one year, I would say it happens once a month and when it happens, the resolution is not very swift,” one female resident told the Jamaica Observer on Thursday.

“The leak would be there for five to six weeks before we don’t see a leak again. The other day, maybe about three weeks ago, during a period of heavy rain, I realised that a few days after that there was no water on the road, but it started again, maybe a week and a half ago. If you look, you won’t see the sewage now. I heard that a truck came and pulled away some of it,” she shared.

“It has been something that is sporadic since I have been here. I don’t know if there is ever going to be a permanent solution. I do walk sometimes and there is a bit of hopscotching that I have to do on the sidewalk. It is not the nicest when you have people coming to your gate and they are driving through sewage,” she said.

“I suspect that children who play on the road are affected by that. It just smells really bad,” she added, explaining that the situation does not prevent her from engaging in her daily routine, but she’s not pleased to be walking beside human waste.

Like other residents, she would love to see swift action and a more permanent solution for the problem which also affects some residents of the neighbouring Three Oaks community as the waste water runs onto the streets there as well.

Her comments were corroborated by a male resident.

“There is a clear problem at the pump house. Every minute they come and put a little Band Aid on it. That’s all they seem to do each time. On Wednesday they used a truck to come and draw some of the sewage from the line but probably by tomorrow or the next week it will start running again. We have many elders and a lot of children who live around here,” he said.

“The other day, this little boy got sick. The doctor said he picked up some virus in the air. I don’t know if that was the cause of it though, but this is human waste and this is not good at all. People who walk, the cars splash them up with it. We had to block the road because the taxi men always try to cut out traffic by driving through here,” he told the Observer.

The man said he has complained in several posts on social media about the problem, yet it persists.

“I even go on the prime minister’s social media page but based on the lack of response, I don’t feel they are interested in looking into these things. We get no response from anybody,” he said.

People’s National Party caretaker for St Andrew North Western Ethnie Miller told the Observer that, based on how long the problem has persisted, she doesn’t believe the authorities are seriously interested in fixing it.

“Sometimes when it gets windy and it dries up, the stretch blows around the community. We have persons who every time there is an overflow their children in particular are sick. My concern about all of this is that it is not a recent matter. It has been brought to the attention of the authorities before. Representatives, prior to my being here, have been advised and I think they have been taking a piecemeal or a wait-and-see approach to the matter. They wait until there is an overflow or a protest from residents. The reality is that NWC will send the truck to pull off some of the waste but that does not solve the problem because it just keeps coming back,” she said.

Miller called on the authorities to take a long, hard look at the situation and urged them to source a pump that can manage the large volume of waste that passes through the pump house.

The NWC, in its statement Thursday, said an assessment of the facility found that it is inundated with solids and silt.

The water management agency said that several remedial steps had been taken in the past, however the pumps are constantly operating under strain which results in them tripping out, hence the overflows.

“Based on the frequent tripping, it will require an extensive cleaning and desilting exercise that is scheduled for this weekend, April 5-6, 2025. For the interim, the cesspool emptier is being used to alleviate the situation,” the NWC said.