‘We cannot handle anymore,’ Jamaica member of parliament says after storms Zeta, Eta

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.”

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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 Monday night. It poses no threat to land but made 2020 a record-breaking 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.”

The hills and plain were already saturated from the outer bands of Tropical Storm Zeta as it passed the country late last month, she said, when the Meteorological Service of Jamaica issued a flash flood watch for all parishes for Eta. As the system moved westward toward Honduras/Nicaragua as a Category 4 hurricane, its outer bands began affecting Jamaica.

During its strengthening and weakening, the storm’s outer bands continued to shower all of Jamaica with pounding rain. More than a week later, Jamaicans are still experiencing serious flooding, impassable roads, and downed trees.

“The entire Chalky River has broken its bank close to the Nine Mile bridge, carrying silt from the river into the roadway, literally filling the road and the houses to as high as six feet in depth,” Holness said, explaining that there are homes inundated with water and mud.

Other damages include Cane River road, which connects to Nine Mile road. It is all but gone and will need significant work, including the replacement of 3,200 feet of roadway. Gordon Town Road, another major road, also broke off about 40 feet deep and will require a massive retaining wall.

“This is unprecedented. The volumes of landslides and breakaways we have had in a matter of days. It is very unusual,” Holness said. “We have seen nothing like this in Jamaica and we are worried with climate change we will continue to see worse and worse disasters and the impact of people’s homes and their very life.”

While some continue to dispute climate change science, Holness said, “it is very real for us.”

“Observations by persons who would have lived much longer than me are that 50 years ago, they saw nothing like this and some will tell you, 10, 20 years ago, they never could have dreamed they could have experienced this volume of rainfall, this volume of silt washing down from the hills into the plains,” she said.

Jamaica had previously estimated there was at least $18 million in damages to roads and infrastructure as well as $13 million in agricultural losses following three weeks of rain and Tropical Storm Zeta.

Eta’s devastation to major roads, bridges and crops has not yet fully been assessed. Holness estimates it will be in “billions” of Jamaican dollars. That’s a hefty price tag, she noted, for a small developing country.

“We were almost until recently called Third World in most of the referrals. So it’s very understood we are not in a position that we have the volume of wealth to be able to support so much at the same time,” she said. “We have been paying down our debt and we pride ourselves on our economy starting to grow.”

But those gains have been eroding, she noted, with the costly effort to try to control the coronavirus pandemic. Now coming on the back of those investments is the major damage of this year’s hurricane season to the country’s road and bridges.

“It is going to be very trying times for our government,” she said.

While some Jamaicans have been calling on the government to do more, Holness said they are quickly trying to address concerns. They have asked people whose homes are likely to slide or sink to evacuate into shelter — never an easy thing to do, especially with concerns over COVID-19.

She and public works teams have been out. While they have been trying to clear roads, she herself has been out late into the night and before midday passing out food to residents in distress, Holness said..

“We have been exceedingly responsive as a government. We’re out there every single day. We are moving around. We are with the people and we will continue to work hard and do our very best,” she said. “We ask the citizens of Jamaica to be mindful that it does take time and cost to do some of this work. We are all in this together and we must work together.”

Miami Herald staff writer Alex Harris contributed to this report.