HIGHLIGHTING the many benefits of a smart city, Montego Bay Mayor Richard Vernon says advanced modelling technology could significantly strengthen disaster management for weather events like Hurricane Melissa while also improving efficiency and the overall flow of services and information.

A long-time advocate for introducing the system to Montego Bay, he said he’s ready for the western city to be transformed, noting that full implementation of a smart city could realistically take up to five years, contingent on securing the revenue needed for it to be sustainable.

Vernon, in explaining how a smart city would operate, told the Jamaica Observer that it is far from the ideas of flying cars and robots.

“It requires everything around it to be smart, and then you create an integrated operation centre; so you need a smart airport, a smart stadium, smart schools, smart police stations, smart hospitals, and smart health centres. You have to computerise all of them, so much so that you can generate real time data so that the number of patients at Catherine Hall Health Centre and the Montego Bay Comprehensive Centre per day, per minute, per second, that is being uploaded to a system,” he explained.

A smart city would also introduce cameras that can detect whether a gunshot was fired, who fired it, and track the individual, notifying the police, he added. It would also help with garbage collection by highlighting areas that have not been serviced and informing the National Solid Waste Management Authority.

The mayor explained that, similarly, the modelling component of a smart city would allow for the collection of data from the sea and all weather systems, to predict weather events.

“It will predict what might happen this year or what might happen in a few days. It also tells you [information] in the modelling [of] the wave movement [as] it tells you if you’re going to get a storm surge, the type of storm surge you’re going to get, if the shoreline is receding, and if there is damage to corals — it tells you all of that information,” he told the Sunday Observer.

The mayor noted that it would only be sustainable if the revenue is available.

The push to transform Montego Bay into Jamaica’s first smart city began over a decade ago in 2014, with then Local Government Minister Noel Arscott announcing that the project would come under the Emerging and Sustainable Cities Initiative and be funded by the Inter-American Development Bank. The project was to introduce technology-driven solutions such as smart traffic systems, security cameras, and integrated monitoring tools aimed at improving sustainability and overall city management. However, the project stalled.

Two years later, in 2016, New Kingston was designated as the pilot area to implement digital tech for better services such as parking, Wi-Fi, lighting, and waste using partners like the Jamaica Public Service (JPS) and the Tuatara Group. A Smart City Forum was held by the Jamaica Public Service in September 2023 about the steps needed to bring the concept to reality.

For more, check out the Jamaica Observer special series, ‘Jamaica: Post-Hurricane Melissa – The People. The Places. The Progress’, documenting the nation’s journey to rebuild after the passage of Hurricane Melissa, on our YouTube channel.