Reggae Falls and its potential

THE EDITOR, Sir:

I NOTE that your contributor Jan Keil, writing about the electrical supply in Jamaica, expressed puzzlement as to why the Morant River hydropower station (now called Reggae Falls) is out of service.

Having worked at PCJ Engineering some years ago and later with William (Bill) Saunders, I am familiar with the situation. The reasons are twofold: one is that the dam is full to the brim with rocks of various sizes, gravel and sand, transported downstream into the dammed section of the river where they come to rest, more so in heavy rainfall events. This is typical of many rivers in Jamaica, and would be a bane of making freshwater pumped storage facilities (which Jan also mentioned earlier) in river courses. The second is that during a very heavy rainfall (which, if my memory serves me right, was associated with a hurricane) the large pipe (the penstock) to the power house and much of the power house was washed away. Later I was told that the hydro turbines, which had been spared, had been (short-sightedly, if you ask me) removed and exported.

Later, Bill and Winston Hay proposed using the river flow (a “run of the river” hydro station) to generate power to offset the power demands of the nearby Serge Island Dairy processing plant (which has now been shut down and relocated to Bog Walk), but this fell through. A part of the cooling requirement of the dairy, after UHT (ultra-high temperature) pasteurising before packaging in the ‘long life’ Tetra Pak packaging could also have been done to reduce the electrical chiller requirements. But then, we don’t really look at all the ways we can be more profitable, do we?