Gareth Manning, Staff Reporter

GOOD OLD father time seems to have forgotten Hillside. Sitting at the foot of the Blue Mountains in St Thomas, it looks like a typical countryside enveloped in shawls of greenery.

But the bare hillsides casting their shadow over the village tell this reporter that Hillside is a community awaiting the advent of another environmental disaster.

Sixteen years ago to date, flood rains sent hillsides packed with mud and trees crashing down on the village. The mud flow destroyed six houses. A10-year-old boy died as a heavy tide of mud, water and fallen trees crashed into his grandmother's house.

Today, the evidence of the tragedy is still visible. Once deep, seemingly bottomless ravines are still choked with debris. Skeletons of washed-up houses still lay half buried in layers of earth.

Dilapidated structures

Unable to relocate or repair their homes, several residents continue to live in the dilapidated structures.

"Them come and them take picture. About three set of people come right here and enquire about the flood and things like that, and nothing at all we don't get," said 70-year-old coffee farmer, Ezekiel Johnson.

Venting their frustration, residents are still blaming the Forest Industries Development Company (FIDCO), a government entity, which, in the mid- to late 1980s, cut a road through the mountains for the purpose of logging. Prior to 1993, residents claim they were flooded out three times following the construction of the road.

But January 1993 would bring the worst of the floods.

"Is the road and the basket (gabion built above a gully) that mash it up. If it wasn't for that, the water pass through," Johnson told The Sunday Gleaner.

Some experts agreed back then that FIDCO should share some of the blame. The topography of the land was changed, they said, when the road was built by FIDCO. The heavy equipment often used could also have caused brittle shale beneath the surface to become unstable and to easily wash down the slopes on to the houses below if enough rainfall occurred.

And there was enough on January 26 to do the job.

Vast deforestation

Geologists like Raffi Ahmad, who studied the landscape of Hillside, also acknowledged that FIDCO could have induced the deluge by its activities in the mountains above the community. But at the time, he said, vast deforestation was the major player in the disaster, following years of woodcutting and clearing of the mountainside.

Government's Mines and Geology Division also recognised the role of the road construction. In a report, it said: "Road construction created a large amount of cut-slope failures, which greatly enhanced the transportation of rock and soil during the heavy rains."

Johnson added: "Before them go up there and make it (the road), any time the rain fall, gully come down, it just pass through. It don't damage anything. But [because] of the basket that them make up there, that is what damage the system. Cause the only little thing happen them have a little landslide up there and all that come down with the basket of rock stone."

According to Rita McDuffus, grandmother of Gilbert Brown, the 10-year-old who was killed, the community wanted to sue the company, but was advised by their member of parliament at the time that Government would take care of the matter.

The flood uprooted the lives of many, if not everyone, in the village.

Johnson is still living in the shell of what was once his house. The flood took everything from him, including a shop and two other houses which were in the yard. In total, it took about half a million dollars from him, he said.

losses

Brown's grandmother, 70-year-old McDuffus, said apart from a little assistance with her grandson's funeral, she received nothing. She was not even assisted with getting some furniture, though she lost a significant portion of her house and all its contents. She was only allowed to rebuild on a piece of land on another side of the community, where she has managed to rebuild a two-room house.

"After 16 years, I don't feel good about the treatment I got. I think it is very unjust, because what I got for losing everything was nothing," McDuffus sighed.

"It is so sad because me lose me grandson and I am now 70 years old and not even one bed the government give me," she lamented.

Forty-eight-year-old Joan Harris, who also thinks the new road was responsible for the tragedy, lost her house and grocery shop. She got help to build a one-room house on a piece of land near the school to house their seven-member family, but, this she said, was not enough.

LEFT: Joan Harris, 48, and her family lost their entire nine-room house to the 1993 flood, which damaged several houses in Hillside, St Thomas. Behind her is a two-bedroom house the family managed to build.
RIGHT: This one-room dwelling is a replica of some houses Hillside residents received after their houses were destroyed by a flood in January 1993.