A Silver Pen Winner Blamed Concrete Houses for Her Neighbourhood’s Landslides

• Barbara Gloudon wrote in anguish over Gordon Town overdevelopment
• She called for a new national map of where to build and where not to
• She blamed modern concrete and steel construction for hillside pressure
• She admitted no one had mapped where regulatory authority actually crosses

Gleaner Silver Pen winner Barbara Gloudon, the veteran communications specialist and broadcaster, wrote in anguish at overdevelopment in the hills of St Andrew surrounding her own Gordon Town home, which she blamed for causing landslides by pressuring the hillsides, calling for considerably greater regulation and enforcement.

Her proposed fix was specific and structural: the time has come for a new mapping of Jamaica to look at where development has been taking place and what the effects have been on the environment, and for a kind of map to show where to and where not to build, she wrote, framing the recent flooding and damage to the Kennedy Grove scheme as direct proof of why such mapping had become urgent rather than merely prudent.

Gloudon’s specific engineering critique targeted the construction methods themselves rather than density alone: modern housing construction’s reliance on heavy concrete and steel, she argued, was pressuring the hillsides and making them more vulnerable to landslides, a material-specific claim distinct from the slope-classification approach the later Hillside Development Manual for Jamaica would formalise. She noted how much had changed in the prior 30 years to worsen the underlying situation, traffic up 100-fold and garbage dumping by non-residents also increasing.

She was candid about the administrative confusion complicating any real fix: there are sections where the KSAC has responsibility and other areas fall under rural land administration. I don’t think anyone has stopped to look where the lines cross, she wrote, adding she suspected the government agencies concerned were also simply overwhelmed. Nearly two decades before this publication documented the same jurisdictional gap in the Tavistock Terrace landslide, Gloudon had already identified it as the structural weakness beneath Jack’s Hill’s repeated hillside failures.

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