Gareth Manning, Gleaner Writer

A house in Kennedy Grove in Clarendon during flood rains in October 2005. - Norman Grindley /Deputy Chief Photographer

The housing Ministry insists that it is design and engineering flaws by its partner, KID Development Company, coupled with a lack of effective enforcement by regulatory agencies, that lie behind consistent catastrophic flooding at the Kennedy Grove housing complex in Clarendon.

But while the ministry has, in a report on the scheme, sought to exculpate itself of responsibility for the problems, others, including the Clarendon Parish Council, remain adamant that the ministry must share a substantial portion of the blame.

"We do the general monitoring of road and construction design, but under the Housing Act, we are only required to make comments," Milton Brown, the chairman of the Clarendon local government said in an interview on Friday. "It is the ministry that must enforce."

This issue is among those which remain in dispute as parties attempt to determine why things went so awfully wrong at Kennedy Grove, a development of 220 homes, completed in 1999 as a joint venture between KID, a now-defunct company controlled by businessman Ian Harris, and the Housing Ministry. In this joint venture, Government put in the land and KID concentrated on the other aspects of the development.

But homeowners, for the most part, have been unable to enjoy their properties. When it rains, they usually face severe flooding and damage - as happened in July 2002, September 2004, and again in October 2005. At least four of them have filed lawsuits against the Government and KID.

Part of the problem, as is conceded in the Housing Ministry's June 2006 report on the project - a copy of which has been obtained by The Sunday Gleaner - is the fact that the scheme is built in a place where houses should never have been constructed, or with only the best of design and engineering.

Relying on geographic and hydrological analyses by the Water Resources Authority (WRA), the Housing Ministry said that the site of the project is unsuited for housing. The land is prone to flooding, given its proximity to a karstic limestone depression with clayey overlays. The features of karstic formations include sinkholes and underground streams.

"The depression is, therefore, prone to various levels of flooding, depending on the intensity and duration of rainfall events," the ministry said in the report.

The land could conceivably have been built on, but that would have required adequate drainage "to mitigate the flooding to an acceptable level". And that is precisely what KID failed to do.

The scheme's storm-water drainage may seem, on the face of it, adequate, the ministry report says. It is designed for waterto converge at the depression south of the scheme and drain into a sinkhole.

But, according to the Housing Ministry's document, the system was compromised by construction-related activities on the part of the developer. The upshot: During heavy rainfall, the sinkhole's capacity to drain water from the depression is exceeded. The result: flooding.

Non-compliance

KID might have become aware of the potential problem, the report indicated, if it had paid attention to the then Natural Resources Conservation Authority (NRCA) to which it had applied for an environmental permit.

The company received a conditional permit, but did not collect the document so remained unaware of the NRCA's demand for design changes. But neither did KID, the document says, get approval for its drainage plans from the then Ministry of Local Government.

KID then submitted an application to the National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) (which succeeded the NRCA) for a sewage permit and licence. The application was rejected as incomplete. The developer, however, proceeded to build the sewage on the property.

Said the report: "There is no evidence that the developer sought or obtained drainage approval from the relevant authority and what this incident speaks to, therefore, is serious regulatory non-compliance by the developer, compounded by the failure of the regulatory bodies to take enforcement action.

"In seeking to ensure that the Kennedy Grove incident is never repeated, we must therefore of necessity address two key issues, namely: The capacity of regulators to detect technical non-compliance with conditions on permits and the will of regulators to enforce compliance."

There is no indication, however, of what, if any role, the ministry played as a partner in the venture to ensure that regulatory and other requirements were followed for the scheme.

In any event, NEPA says the responsibility for policing the Kennedy Grove development, particularly with regard to the sewage plant, did not rest with it. The agency was not the one that granted a permit to KID for the facility.

Construction, according to NEPA officials, would have happened under the Housing Act, so oversight would have been the responsibility of the Housing Ministry and the parish council.

"The responsibility would primarily be that of the parish council," NEPA's public education manager, Zadie Neufville, told The Sunday Gleaner. "We can't know that a plant has been constructed unless we are told that a plant is constructed."

Even though an environmental permit was approved by her agency, Neufville said, NEPA would still have been powerless to monitor the development because KID did not collect the permit. "If you don't collect the permit, then you don't have a permit and so we can't police," she said.

Furthermore, Neufville argued, NEPA only had the power to make recommendations to the parish council and not the power to stop construction. Such orders can only be issued by the ministry and the local parish council.

While the Attorney-General's Department attempts to negotiate a settlement with the homeowners, the Housing Ministry says it has taken a number of actions since the 2005 flood to bring immediate and temporary relief to the residents. It is also formulating long-term solutions to the problem. Among the things already done have been the draining of the pond area and the repair of broken sewage pumps .

As a long-term solution, the ministry said it would direct water from the pond to a tributary of the Rio Minho, which is approximately 1.5 kilometres west of the scheme. It would also construct additional sinkholes to increase drainage. The work will cost the Government over $50 million.