By Yard Report, Kingston.
image: “https://picsum.photos/seed/clarendon-flood/1280/720"
AENON TOWN, CLARENDON — Sections of northern Clarendon were impassable on Tuesday as widespread flooding cut off Aenon Town from surrounding communities for a second consecutive day. Member of Parliament for Clarendon Northern, Wavel Hinds, told reporters the situation began Sunday night and has steadily worsened since.
Councillor Delroy Dawson, who represents the Aenon Town Division, confirmed that multiple routes were blocked and that residents attempting to travel through the area were stranded on both sides of the flooding. No fatalities have been reported as of Tuesday morning, but vehicles remain stuck and at least one community is without potable water delivery after tanker trucks were turned back.
The timing is ugly. Aenon Town is inside a stretch of the parish that was already weakened by Hurricane Melissa in October — the Category 5 storm that the Prime Minister declared a national disaster. Drainage systems across northern Clarendon were overwhelmed in that event, and residents have told the Gleaner in the months since that repair work has been slow, piecemeal, and in some cases not begun.
What the current flooding surfaces is not the rain itself. Jamaica is in the wet season. Rain is scheduled. What the flooding surfaces is the gap between what the drainage system was supposed to do after Melissa and what it is actually doing now, six months out.
Hinds is now pushing for an emergency drainage audit across the parish, with results made public. The ask is reasonable. Whether it arrives before the next heavy rainfall is a separate question, and one that residents of Aenon Town have reason to doubt.
What to watch:
- Public release of any drainage assessment, not just its existence. Audits that live in internal folders do not prevent the next Aenon Town.
- The timeline from assessment to contract. Post-disaster drainage work in the Caribbean regularly stalls between the “we identified the problem” phase and the “contract awarded” phase. That gap is where communities get flooded twice.
- Whether the recovery framework from the October Recover Better Conference is being applied here, or whether Clarendon is being treated as a separate file.
For diaspora readers watching from Brooklyn, Bronx, Toronto, Birmingham: if you are sending money home this week, the bottleneck between what you send and what arrives is not the transfer app. It is the road to Aenon Town.
image: “https://picsum.photos/seed/clarendon-flood/1280/720"
The Tradewinds Brief covers Jamaica, the Caribbean, and Africa from the diaspora. Follow for daily updates.