Editorial | Melissa clean-up brigades

The emergence of several cases of leptospirosis and tetanus in western Jamaica since the passage of Hurricane Melissa underlines the need for fast action by the Government to head off a potential public health crisis in the region.

This includes getting public health facilities back into operation as quickly as possible to treat people who injure themselves, or otherwise fall ill. The authorities should also launch an aggressive public education campaign to warn Jamaicans about communicable diseases common in post-catastrophe situations, and how best to avoid them.

But the best result will be achieved by a massive clean-up of the physical environment, including removing, as quickly as possible, as much of the 4.8 million tonnes –and rising – of debris, which the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) said Melissa left in the hard-hit parishes of St Elizabeth, Westmoreland, Hanover, St James and Trelawny. This volume of waste, from a single event, is more than four times the amount of solid waste collected annually by the island’s National Solid Waste Management Authority (NSWMA).

But an urgent clean-up would not only be good for public health. It would also help to return a sense of normality to people’s lives, while providing the Government an avenue for putting money into people’s pockets for doing vital work. That, in turn, would start the resuscitation of livelihoods and return economic activity to western Jamaica.

REAL IMPACT

Melissa, a Category 5 storm, killed 45 people, damaged or destroyed more than 130,000 homes and compromised public infrastructure, including roads, bridges, power and water distribution facilities, schools, hospitals and clinics.

By the Government’s latest estimate (delivered by the environmental minister, Matthew Samuda, at the COP30 conference in Belém, Brazil), the storm left US$10 billion in damage, which, based on the IMF’s latest public figure of the economy, amounts to over 43 per of Jamaica’s GDP.

However, the real impact is likely to be greater when the indirect effects of the hurricane on the economy are fully taken into account.

Indeed, Melissa has brought much of western Jamaica’s economic activity to a standstill.

For instance, St Elizabeth, especially the parish’s southern region, is a critical agricultural area. Large swathes of the parish’s agricultural lands are inundated. It may be several months before much of it is drained and ready for planting again. Tens of thousands of livestock are dead.

The upshot: thousands of farmers are out of work and without income. So, too, are thousands of tourism workers employed to hotels, restaurants and attractions that are now damaged and shuttered. Barbers, hairdressers, other self-employed people, as well as shop attendants are also idle. The few shops and stores that remain open are largely limping.

In the face of this crisis, western Jamaica is in need of a dose of Keynesian economics, government spending – a sort of economic defibrillation. Which is what countries tend to do when they find themselves in these situations, and is indeed anticipated in Jamaica’s fiscal accountability laws.

In this regard, spending on a clean-up would be a good place to start, because putting the region back in shape is an absolute necessity.

PSYCHOLOGICAL BOOST

The 11 leptospirosis cases so far reported in the west are almost certainly related to rats – who transmit the disease through their urine and defecation – finding safe haven in rubble, and coming into closer proximity to humans. The accumulation of debris also provides potential breeding grounds for other dangerous vermin and vectors. They are also hazards for injuries that can lead to bacterial infections, such as tetanus.

By the UNDP’s early, and provisional, estimate, there were 480,000 standard truckloads of debris and garbage to be removed. That is being built on as people expand their efforts to remove muck, destroyed furniture and other waste from their homes. So, hardly a dent has been made in the real requirement of clean-up.

This newspaper therefore proposes that work brigades – appropriately managed and supervised to ensure that real value is delivered for the pay – be organised in the parishes most badly affected by the hurricane.

Apart from the jump-start that this will help to give to the western economy, as well as its value to public health, there is another potential advantage: the psychological boost it will provide to the people involved – and the west in general.

People doing gainful work, and not worried about their immediate livelihoods, are less likely to become victims of the Melissa funk, and to fall into depression. That is good for society.