JAMAICA | Drowning in Neglect: Sandy Gully's Two-Decade Scandal Comes Home to Roost

KINGSTON, Jamaica October 5, 2025 - The floodwaters that swamped Kingston's Corporate Area in recent weeks didn't just expose inadequate drainage—they ripped the cover off a two-decade scandal of institutional neglect that has left one of Jamaica's most critical waterways teetering on the edge of catastrophic failure.

Shadow Minister for Urban Renewal and Redevelopment Dennis Gordon isn't mincing words. "The Sandy Gully is no longer a routine maintenance matter. It is a national infrastructure emergency," he declared Saturday, demanding that the government stop treating this vital drainage channel like an afterthought before more lives and properties are lost.

But Gordon's five-point demand to the National Works Agency reads less like a policy proposal and more like a forensic investigation into administrative failure.

He's asking for engineering reports, structural assessments, and maintenance records spanning 20 years—the kind of basic documentation that should already exist if anyone had been minding the store.

The fact that a Shadow Minister must formally request evidence that the government has any comprehensive plan exposes the uncomfortable truth: for two decades, successive administrations have played Russian roulette with Kingston's drainage infrastructure, banking on luck instead of investment.

Gordon's demands paint a damning picture. He wants socio-economic surveys of communities along the gully—suggesting no one in government can currently answer basic questions about who lives in harm's way or what the human cost of failure would be.

He's requesting cadastral maps and land tenure data, implying that even property ownership along this critical corridor remains murky. Most tellingly, he's asking for records of all upgrades over the past 20 years, a request that will likely reveal a maintenance history as spotty as Kingston's potholed roads.

"We cannot continue to wait for disaster before we act," Gordon said, but that's precisely what Jamaica has done. The pattern is grimly familiar: heavy rains fall, gullies overflow, communities flood, politicians promise action, headlines fade, nothing changes. Rinse and repeat until the next deluge.

The Shadow Minister is demanding what should have existed all along: a dedicated percentage of the national capital budget for long-term rehabilitation and maintenance of major drainage systems.

Without it, he warns, vulnerable communities face "repeated cycles of destruction and recovery"—a polite way of saying the government has trapped residents in a perpetual disaster loop.

This isn't just about concrete and culverts. It's about fundamental questions of governance. How does a drainage channel serving hundreds of thousands of people operate without comprehensive engineering assessments?

How do communities develop along a major waterway without proper land tenure documentation? How does any government claim to prioritize citizen safety while refusing to fund basic infrastructure maintenance?

Gordon's call for environmental enforcement and waste management systems acknowledges another uncomfortable reality: the Sandy Gully crisis isn't just about government neglect—it's compounded by illegal dumping, unregulated development, and the kind of collective civic breakdown that turns drainage channels into garbage dumps.

The timing of Gordon's intervention—in the wake of fresh flooding—ensures maximum political impact, but the underlying crisis has been building for years while bureaucrats shuffled papers and politicians cut ribbons elsewhere.

Lives and properties remain under "imminent threat," not because of some unforeseen natural disaster, but because of calculable, preventable institutional failure.

The question now is whether this government will finally treat Sandy Gully as the emergency it is, or whether Kingstonians will simply brace for the next flood and the next empty promise.

The gully is full. So is the public's patience.

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