THE EDITOR, Sir:
MANY YEARS ago, Jamaica suffered very heavy rains islandwide, especially in the Corporate Area, then Kingston and St. Andrew.
The net result was that the Kingston and St. Andrew area was in danger of flood and loss of life and property.
Fortunately gully courses had recently been paved and walls retained in some cases with basketed stone walls and sand floors and, where it then could be afforded, stone walls and concrete floors.
The historical result is that loss of life and property from flooding was averted in Kingston and St. Andrew.
The headline the next day in The Gleaner was 'Kingston saved by paved gullies' and eventually in the vernacular 'Gully Govt. saves Jamaica' for in fact there was in some quarters at the time great resentment to spending the then large sums of money to pave gullies, But the fact remains that paved gullies saved Jamaica.
SYMBOLIC VALUE OF JAMAICA
In my opinion, however, gullies are not just stone and mortar; a gully is a dry riverbed that can be empty one day and a raging torrent the next day. It can be a receptacle for garbage and sand one day or transformed the next day.
So a gully is really one of the symbolic values of Jamaica. 'How you treat it is how it treats you' and I now put forward the fact that a new set of environmental hazards now face not only mountains, our rivers, our gully courses, our flat land and our coastal and harbour areas and, late on this agenda, the recent patters of the indiscriminate filling and dredging of harbour areas and last but not least tree-cutting.
To compound the situation, all of these elements are linked in some way or another but the new element is erosion, siltation and mud flows, filling and dredging; and all of this ends in our harbours and sea-coast.
I am not going to make a list of these areas or locations, for that has been repeated over and over.
The time now is for solutions and this letter is to bring the public including myself on board, for solutions are not going to come from professionals alone but the public at large.
So I close on the cry bring back 'gully govt' in solving our environment problems.
I am, etc.,
PETER SOARES
16 Allerdyce Drive
Kingston 8
