Gov't to purchase thousands of container homes as Jamaica rebuilds following Hurricane Melissa

The Government has determined it will use "pre-built containerised modular solutions" as it seeks to rapidly rebuild the housing stock destroyed by Hurricane Melissa.

Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness told a press conference on Wednesday that the National Housing Trust is to purchase 5,000 of these container homes in the initial stage, some of which it will sell to individuals, while some are to be used to build housing schemes.

He says a portion will be allocated for free distribution through the Government's social housing programme.

Holness also said the Government will be purchasing some of these homes to be distributed as social housing.

"We have to do a rapid deployment of housing solutions and the easiest way to do this is to use the containerised solutions," Holness said.

He noted that it would take time to bring enough containers into the island to make a significant impact, but stated that the procurement process has started.

He said shipping alone could take between 30 and 90 days.

"We are not going to get them here for Christmas. I'll just have to be frank with everybody, but we should start to see some coming in by late January, and those that come in initially, we are going to be looking at the worst cases assessed to make them available. For Christmas and for the initial stages, we are going to have to try to do the shelter repair kits, the heavy-duty tarpaulin, and those kinds of solutions in addition to the rebuilding, the actual putting on roofs and so forth," Holness said.

Holness also stated that the Government will be providing rebuilding grants, but said the amounts have not yet been decided on as assessments are continuing.

"We are not going to wait until we have assessed every single house, but we do need to reach a critical threshold, where we begin to see how the damage is stacking up from a statistical point of view, so we now how much to allocate for minor repairs, how much to allocate for moderate repairs and how much to allocate for severe."

Holness said the picture should become clearer when the Government gets to about 30,000 assessments.

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