By Erica James-King, Staff Reporter
The shattered grill, door and floor of the basic school are reminders of the landslide that shifted the school down a hill in Tangle River.
WESTERN BUREAU:
RESIDENTS OF Tangle River in southern St. James walk around the community as if in a daze. Their movements are almost mechanical except for the look of horror they carry around.
And who wouldn't be, if one Sunday morning you awoke to find that your church is in another location, the basic school shattered, and a graveyard shifted, causing the tombs to burst open, revealing their coffin-laden
contents.
And there is more to the devastation visited upon the people of Tangle River. Landslides have torn away its main road, buried a house, and sent other dwellings plunging down a hillside.
"It is as if the church just jumped down the hill. I was in awe when I saw the church on Sunday morning," bemoaned Rev. Rose Cameron, pastor of the Tangle River Baptist Church, shaking her head in disbelief. "A big concrete building like that just uprooted, shattered and is hanging down the hillside."
The church was a fairly new structure, constructed in 1994, and housed the Tangle River Basic School in its basement. The pastor points out that both buildings have now become safety hazards.
"The church was to have been used as a shelter in the hurricane but we were never contacted by anyone who wanted to use the facility. So it was locked up. If anyone was in that shelter, they might have been killed," said Rev. Cameron.
To the The Sunday Gleaner, the Tangle River Baptist Church seemed like it had been hit by a bomb. The floor and tiles were broken up in several places, large gaping holes criss-crossed the floor and the roof and steps were broken.
The Sunday Gleaner also observed bathroom fixtures ripped apart by the impact of the landslide and steel protruding from the crumbling walls, while the grills guarding the doors were badly twisted. Windows and doors had been torn off in the landslide.
What surprises the residents however, is that the landslides of Tangle River were not caused by surface flooding.
Reports from the community are that the heavy rains that pounded the area from Friday through to Sunday as a result of Hurricane Ivan seem to have saturated underground water caverns and the water table in that community, causing a twisting and folding of the earth, thereby triggering the landslides.
Eighty-year-old Olive Foster who lives next door to the Baptist church seems to be the only member of the Tangle River community who felt like something catastrophic was going to happen in the community before it occurred.
"On the Friday night in the hurricane I heard a big rumbling like a train in the community. My husband and I couldn't figure out where it was coming from," said the golden-ager. "On Saturday night again the rumbling went on for a long while, and it sounded like water was rumbling under the earth. I said to my husband, it seem like the water burst, the water burst."
Derrick Kellier, Member of Parliament for Southern St. James sums up the road dislocation situation. "A stretch of the road in the vicinity of the Baptist church which has been ripped apart by a landslide has fallen over a gully. This has cut off one section of Tangle River from the other."
It has also disrupted pedestrian and vehicular traffic between Tangle River and the neighbouring communities of Vaughns-field/Flamstead.
"It will take many months for this Tangle River Road slippage to be addressed," disclosed Steven Shaw, National Works Agency's western regional community relations officer.
