Dear Editor,

The scenes that unfolded in Catherine Hall and Westgreen in St James after Hurricane Melissa were heartbreaking.

I passed through the area myself in the days after the storm and the sight has stayed with me. Homes stood buried in thick mud. Families walking through layers of silt that reached their chests. Entire lives were soaked, stained, and displaced. The shock on the faces of those who had lost everything was impossible to ignore. What happened there was not a distant headline, it was a living tragedy experienced by neighbours, friends, and fellow Jamaicans, and it has left a mark on all who witnessed it.

Reports in local newspapers and residents on social media documented homes buried under thick mud and silt, families displaced for weeks, and a clean-up operation that has, so far, removed 700 truckloads of debris — as of Saturday, November 15, 2025 — from the area. These accounts also record that flood water in some locations rose to extraordinary heights and, in others, the mud left in the aftermath rendered houses uninhabitable for days.

Residents told both local and international journalists and officials that they believe the Barnett River, the Pye River, and the storm surge converged on the entire area where drainage and channel geometry had recently been altered by infrastructure works. Local testimony and reporting allege that these changes resulted in the narrowing and reconfiguration of flow paths and the trapping of sediment-laden flood water inside residential areas. These observations are the basis of the urgent demand by residents that independent experts need to be summoned to map what actually happened.

The scale of this mass removal of debris and silt tells us that this was not a simple overland flow event. The thick silt and debris left in homes and on roads is consistent with fast-moving water that became suddenly constricted and lost competence, dropping its load in inhabited terrain. This is a technical fingerprint that engineers and planners must treat seriously.

The Kanseche case in Malawi, south-east Africa, in 2022, offers a painful and highly instructive parallel, in that event embankments built to protect a sugar estate are alleged to have redirected flood water during Tropical Storm Ana into a neighbouring village, dramatically increasing flood depth and velocity. As a result, more than 1,700 villagers have brought a legal claim in the English High Court against Associated British Foods, the company involved, arguing that the engineered works transferred risk from a commercial estate onto vulnerable people. Associated British Foods denied liability and contested the findings, but the case crystallised the ethical and technical problem we face when protective infrastructure is installed without transparent assessment of downstream and lateral impacts.

Comparing Kanseche with Catherine Hall and Westgreen forces a hard truth. In both places human interventions have been accused of changing how water moved across the landscape, and, in both places, communities paid the price. The mechanisms are not identical, but the causal logic is the same. Continuous embankments and raised road fills can prevent rivers from spreading into their natural floodplains, thereby concentrating energy and sediment into narrower corridors. Bridge abutments and road fills can produce local pinch points that raise water surface elevations upstream and force flows over alternative paths that cut through neighbourhoods.

When multiple rivers and coastal surge meet, small reductions in cross-sectional areas can translate into very large increases in flood depth and destructive capacity. These are well understood processes in fluvial hydraulics, and yet they are repeatedly ignored or under modelled in project planning.

There is also a social dimension that cannot be separated from the hydraulics. In Malawi, the villagers allege that protective works were designed to benefit commercial land and that warnings about heightened flood risk were not acted upon. In Montego Bay residents have voiced similar outrage and fear. When decisions on infrastructure are taken without meaningful consultation, and when environmental impact assessments do not explicitly and publicly address flood redistribution and sediment dynamics, the result is predictable. In this case, however, it was not merely a small inconvenience or misfortune; families lost everything.

The remedies are technical, legal, and political. Technically we must insist that all river corridor works include robust hydraulic and sediment transport assessments that are open to independent review. We must prioritise measures that restore floodplain connectivity and give rivers room to spread where lives are not at stake. Legally, we must ensure that those who alter flow regimes carry the burden of demonstrating that they are not transferring risk onto others. Politically, we must insist on community participation and transparent decision-making as prerequisites for any project that reconfigures drainage.

The clean-up of Catherine Hall and Westgreen will cost time and money, but the lasting remedy is prevention through better design and better governance.

I urge the authorities and the public to treat the events in Catherine Hall as an opportunity to learn before the next storm arrives. Commission the independent forensic hydrology study for which residents are asking. Publish the project-level assessments for the perimeter road and associated works and let independent teams test them against what we now know occurred during Melissa.

If the investigations show that recent works aggravated flooding, then remedial measures and compensation must follow. If they show that the disaster was unavoidable, even with perfect planning, then let that, too, be proven with transparent evidence. Either way, we will only reduce future harm by confronting the interaction between infrastructure and nature honestly and urgently.

Hurricanes will become more intense as the climate warms, and our towns will only be safe if engineers and planners treat water and sediment as shared public goods, rather than material to be directed without consequence. My training tells me that the science is clear and that solutions exist. What is needed now is leadership, transparency, and a willingness to put community safety ahead of convenience. The people of Catherine Hall and Westgreen deserve nothing less.

Juvelle Taylor

Lecturer

Montego Bay Community College

juvelle.taylor@yahoo.com