Hurricane Melissa road damage preliminarily estimated at $35 billion

 

Jamaica's road recovery comes with a J$35 billion price tag. 

 

That's the government's preliminary damage assessment following the devastating hit from Hurricane Melissa, the strongest storm to ever make landfall on the island. 

 

Works Minister Robert Morgan revealed Thursday, during a special media briefing at Jamaica House, that Cabinet on Monday approved $5 billion in emergency spending to jumpstart recovery.

 

"Reopen roads, including some drain cleaning, a billion for road repairs, and this is just emergency road repairs, and also $2 billion for repairs to gullies, particularly the Sandy Gully, the North and South Gully and their tributaries, as well as some minor culverts, gullies and fordings across the island. We have Cabinet permission to spend $5 billion on that. I want to advise though that while we are going to be spending $5 billion, the cost preliminarily that we have seen in terms of damage to our road infrastructure is about $35 billion, but we have not yet completed our assessments. So we expect that that figure will increase over time," he explained. 

 

Minister Morgan said the government remains committed to swift and transparent rebuilding, noting that a detailed parish by parish damage report will follow once engineering teams wrap-up assessments. 

 

In the meantime, the minister said about 30 roads remain blocked, down from 61 which was reported last week.

 

"As you can see, the number increased from 370 the last time I presented to now it's 396 roads affected. And the issue with the disaster is that sometimes you clear a road and it becomes blocked again, as was the case in sections of St. James over the last 48 hours, where we did clear a lot of the roads in St. James, such as Adelphi, but because of heavy rains, those roads became blocked again and we had to reopen," he pointed out. 

 

Minister Morgan said 123 roads can accommodate two lanes of traffic, while 248 are single lane access.