Jamaican parliament member says country can’t handle any more hurricanes
Back-to-back tropical storms over the past few weeks, Zeta and Eta, have left Jamaica digging itself out from under washed-out roads, swollen rivers and ravaging landslides that have left at least two people dead and homes buried underneath water and mud.
The hardest hit of the country’s parishes, St. Andrew, was still dealing with reports of water flowing down from the hills on Tuesday as the government hoped for a break in the severe weather and assessments of the devastation countrywide are ongoing.
“I really pray we do not have any more systems,” said Juliet Holness, the member of Parliament for St. Andrew East Rural. “We cannot handle any more at this time.”
There is, however, another storm brewing. It’s currently a tropical wave in the Eastern Caribbean and has a 70 percent chance of forming into a tropical depression over the weekend. If it becomes a tropical storm, it will be named Iota, from the Greek alphabet.
An unusually active 2020 hurricane season left no more names on the regular list as of Sept. 18, and forced the National Hurricane Center, for the second time in 15 years, to turn to the Greek alphabet for storm names. Subtropical Storm Theta formed in the Atlantic on Monday night. It poses no threat to land but made 2020 a recordbreaking storm season.
"The damage has been absolutely severe,” Holness told the Miami Herald about Eta, which drenched South Florida with heavy rains on Monday. “Roads have to be rebuilt, bridges rebuilt, retaining walls rebuilt just to be able to traverse the area.”
Other parishes in Jamaica have been affected as well. Residents have reported boulders, trees and soil tumbling down from the hillsides during Eta’s pounding rains. On Monday, the country’s National Works Agency warned residents of St. Elizabeth parish that it was closely monitoring the New Market area.
“Floodwaters are rising in the area and now impacting the road to Carmel. This road leading to Westmoreland is now impassable,” the NWA tweeted.
Blockages were also reported in the parishes of Clarendon, St. Catherine and Trelawny.
The wife of Prime Minister Andrew Holness, who recently won a second consecutive term in office, Juliet Holness has about 100,000 residents in her constituency. But St. Andrew, which includes most of the capital of Kingston, has just under 1 million people and is by far the hardest hit of the parishes. The reason, Holness said, is due to the land mass in St. Andrew, and the hills, which have been known to break away from time to time.
Adding to the parish’s woes: Five rivers come down from the hills and converge there.
“If there is rain for such an extended period there would be challenges,” she said. “Because most of the rain occurred in the eastern part of the island initially from Zeta and then Eta, we experienced water coming down from the hills, heavy rains falling from the hills and that comes all the way down to the constituency, which is along the seashore in Harbour View and Bull Bay.”