MONTEGO BAY, St James — The Jamaica Social Investment Fund (JSIF) is working towards a January deadline to make hundreds of houses in Catherine Hall, St James, which Hurricane Melissa left flooded and mired in mounds of mud, safe enough for restoration of electricity.

“In the case of Catherine Hall, more than 800 homes were flooded with water, and what you find happening now is that the water is caught up in the conduit…The switches are rusted out, corroded, and so you have a great risk of short circuits of the power supply. No one wants to…plug in their television or refrigerator into that sort of thing,” JSIF Managing Director Omar Sweeney told the
Jamaica Observer.

He and members of his team were in the area, last Tuesday, reaching out to community members and offering support. The work is being done under JSIF’s National Energy Poverty Reduction Project which has been in place since April. It is an initiative of the Ministry of Science, Energy and Telecommunications (MSET).

“We’ve mobilised our contractors, our electricians and our inspectors into the Catherine Hall community and under that programme, we are going to recertify all the homes so that persons can feel confident in reconnecting their supply to the [Jamaica Public Service Co Ltd] JPS,” Sweeney said.

They work closely with the utility company.

“If you had a home that did not have a formal connection, then we have JPS here with us to sign them up to receive prepaid electricity as well as any other personal matters they may want to take up with the JPS. It’s a part of our JPS partnership with the Government to really ensure that people can come on the grid reliably and safely,” explained the JSIF MD.

Throughout the day, Tuesday, JSIF and JPS also distributed care packages to residents impacted by the Category 5 storm that struck on October 28. There were also gifts for children as part of holiday celebrations that took on added meaning, coming in the wake of a natural disaster.

The JSIF and JPS teams have been working in the storm-ravaged community since last week.

“More than 150 households have been inspected and are well on their way to becoming recertified,” said Sweeney.

“I expect that in… early January we should be able to get through the 800 here and move on to other communities,” he added.

The initial goal was to get the job done sooner but challenges that existed before the storm resulted in delays.

“What we found is that not only because of the water damage, but maybe there were situations that needed to be properly corrected before. So what we want to ensure is that some situations that were not quite so safe, that we correct them properly. Because it’s a dense community and any risk of fire or anything like that can affect more than the individual,” said Sweeney.

The work being done on each residence costs about $150,000, and the project extends into other affected parishes.

“We’re also in the Savannah-la-Mar area of Westmoreland, we’re in Flagaman and Santa Cruz in St Elizabeth, and we are here in St James. We will be moving out into other communities: in Christiana and Chudley in Manchester, for example, and in Chambers Pen in Hanover is where we will be continuing the effort,” Sweeney revealed.

“This is just a part of what JSIF does on an everyday basis. It’s really targeting the vulnerable and the most affected in these times and so we continue to do that work. We’re really just glad to be here at this time,” he added.

JSIF is also working on other aspects of the post-hurricane recovery, seamlessly adding new tasks to already-scheduled projects.

“Where we have been working on school construction, we continue to do that. The schools that we’ve been involved in did suffer some damage, and so we’re a part of the repair efforts for those schools in Hanover, in Westmoreland, in St Elizabeth, St James in particular,” Sweeney said.

“We are also working with the farmers, under our rural economic development project, to give them inputs and restore agriculture infrastructure like greenhouses and irrigation equipment, for instance. We consolidated our efforts around helping those farmers to really get back on their feet,” he added.

He pointed to the work done with coffee farmers in particular, in the hills of Blue Mountains, who lost a lot of trees to Hurricane Melissa. JSIF is part of an ongoing push to help them get back into production.