Block it off. That, said a worker who has had to chase illegal dumpers in Bucks Gully, St Thomas, might be the only way to stop people from throwing household items into the watercourse.
Edmund Maynard was speaking to Heather-Lynn’s Habitat as a team from the Future Centre Trust surveyed the latest act of dumping. It was less than six months after the Trust and a team of volunteers from the St Thomas Parish Independence Committee hauled more than two tonnes of illegally dumped garbage from the depths of Bucks Gully.
“Block there,” Maynard said, as he indicated the exposed area above the low retaining wall at the sides of the road.
“Build up there high, high, high; up to this tree and block it and when they get here,” he said, indicating further up the road: “I would block there too. Just block it and they can’t get in.”
Maynard said he had encountered at least one person who was about to tip stuff into the gully.
“I know one time a man went to offload some stuff and he see me and he walk way. He clear out because he see me,” Maynard recalled, as he declared: “This want putting in [the newspaper] and showing everyone.
“I see someone went in here and had down in here clean, clean, clean that water could run. Then they come back down in here and dumping more stuff. In here did clean, clean, clean.”
But he said the culprits waited for the cover of darkness before they committed their acts.
“They don’t come like this time so [afternoon]. They come during the night and dump.”
Programme manager of Future Centre, Ann Harding, said this was because “it’s so isolated that they can come do it without being seen”.
“When they dump, the most immediate effect is that we are grossed out. We are just disgusted by it. The next thing is the diseases because it does collect water and rats live in here, because when we cleaned up we found things running out of it. And then when the big rains come, the water washes it down the gully and it exits out into the sea,” she noted.
Heather-Lynn’s Habitat was also alerted to some illegally-dumped large appliances at Foul Bay Beach, St Philip.
A man, who was at the beach but did not want to be identified, said the area had been cleaned less than three months ago.
“They clean up here good just before Christmas, and like right after Christmas, in the New Year, they start the dumping back here,” he said.
“All this is new. This was dumped in the last three weeks,” he said of the fridge, stove and two freezer chests. A laptop had even been left on one of the appliances, but was later moved.
The man, however, said since a skip had been placed on the beach, the acts of illegal dumping on the road leading to the beach had decreased. People now preferred to bring the items closer to the skip, he added.
“From last year it start getting bad. Sometimes you get guys coming and dumping stuff with their names on it, like large boxes and that kind of stuff.
“They got a coconut man; he comes at nights, like around dusk time, 6:30 p.m./7 p.m. when it going dark, and dumps his shells and then brings his van here and wash it out and then go over the hill,” he added. (HLE)
