GwGAdmin WESTERN BUREAU:
Opposition Leader Mark Golding on Thursday blamed poor infrastructure and a lacklustre garbage-collection system for Tuesday’s devastating floods that caused the death of 12-year-old Jennel Walters, whose grandmother, 68-year-old Beryl Walters, remains missing after also being washed away.
“The infrastructure of the city is really not adequate to address [torrential] rainfall, and so we have regular flooding, and now we’ve lost lives from this flooding,” Golding said on Thursday as he visited the young girl’s Cornwall Courts family home in St James.
Reports are that Jennel, Beryl, and the child’s aunt, Shannon Walters, were passengers in a motor car being driven by Berris Walters, Jennel’s grandfather, when they were trapped by floodwaters along the Westgate main road on Tuesday.
The car was washed into the Montego River, where Berris and Shannon were rescued by bystanders and emergency responders from the Montego Freeport Fire Station, who braved the raging waters.
The body of Jennel, a seventh-grader at Montego Bay High School, was recovered near the cruise ship pier on Tuesday.
Golding comforted her grieving parents, Christine Gilbert and Nicolas Walters, reassuring them that the country was also mourning their loss.
“It’s a terrible tragedy for one family to lose a promising daughter in the first year of high school, and her grandmother is still missing, so they don’t really have closure yet,” Golding told journalists.
He said Tuesday’s tragic death from the flooding is as a result of the ongoing problems of garbage collection in the country and the inadequate arrangement for drain cleaning.
“The municipal corporations are not getting the special allocation to manage the situation with drain cleaning, and so there are a lot of problems with the overflow of water and the attendant damage and loss of lives,” the opposition leader said.
He continued: “This is a serious issue, which needs to be addressed, and we are calling on the Government to look at the situation in Montego Bay in relation to how the drainage system is not working and what needs to be done.”
Golding argued that while the country has been building an excellent road network for decades, “some of the basic infrastructure that are needed so that people can live and survive in their daily routines without danger is lacking, and we need to see the Government responding to this”.
He called for the garbage-collection crisis in the country to be addressed, noting that it was not unique to Montego Bay.
