Silver Pen awardee Barbara Gloudon (centre) tickles the funny bone of Gleaner Company Managing Director Oliver Clarke (left) and Editor-in-Chief Garfield Grandison at The Gleaner's North Street offices yesterday. - ANDREW SMITH/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR
JAMAICANS TOGETHER with the Government need to decide where development should and should not take place, says Gleaner Silver Pen winner Barbara Gloudon.
The communications specialist and broadcaster's letter of July 12, was written in anguish at overdevelopment in the hills of St. Andrew, surrounding her Gordon Town home which she blames for causing landslides by pressuring the hillsides. Greater regulation and enforcement was needed, she stressed.
"The time has come for a new mapping of Jamaica to look at where development has been taking place and what the affects have been on the environment and for a kind of map to show where to and where not to build. We live in a country prone to natural disasters and the recent flooding and what happened to the Kennedy Grove scheme prove how important this is."
She blamed modern housing construction with its reliance on heavy concrete and steel for pressuring the hillsides and making them more vulnerable to landslides. Much has changed in the last 30 years to worsen the situation, she said, with traffic up 100-fold and garbage dumping by non-residents also on the increase.
ADMINISTRATIVE CHALLENGES
But she acknowledged there are administrative challenges. "There are sections where the KSAC (Kingston and St. Andrew Corporation) has responsibility and other areas fall under rural land administration. I don't think anyone has stopped to look where the lines cross ... I suspect also that the Government agencies concerned are also overwhelmed."
But she insisted it is Jamaica, as a whole, not just the Government that needs to take responsibility. People need to show greater awareness of the problem, she said. Otherwise, as she wrote in her letter, "... people will be returning to build in the same danger zones and Government will break its back paying for restoration which will be washed away, sooner than later. Talk about fool-fool!"
