St Ann Property Owners Want the Highway Contractor to Fund Their Beach Restoration

• Excavation for the North-South Highway sent soil down to the coast
• Property owners say it damaged the reef and the swimming beach
• They claim it has hurt their beachfront property values
• They want CHEC to fund the restoration itself

We just want to see our beach come back. Basically, plain and simple, we want it restored to what it was, businessman Michael Drakulich told a Gleaner Editors’ Forum at Jewels Dunn’s River in St Ann, one of several property owners who say the value of their beachfront properties has been damaged by pollution of the swimming beach and harm to the reef, caused by soil washed down from the hills during excavation work China Harbour Engineering Company carried out for the North-South Highway.

The property owners’ case is specific about the mechanism of harm, not just the outcome: they contend the damage stems from improper excavation practices, undertaken with scant regard for preservation of the natural environment, and are asking CHEC directly to fund the beach’s restoration rather than pursuing compensation through a separate government process. The claim ties tangible economic harm, reduced beachfront property values, directly to a construction practice, uncontrolled soil runoff, that a more careful excavation approach could plausibly have avoided.

The St Ann complaint is not CHEC’s only environmental enforcement issue tied to the same highway project. The company was separately shut down by the Mines and Geology Division for illegal quarrying on land it had purchased for the project, quarrying carried out without National Environment and Planning Agency approval, with the Water Resources Authority investigating whether that unauthorised digging had damaged natural water sources. A major infrastructure contractor facing complaints about both unauthorised quarrying and downstream beach and reef damage from the same broader construction effort suggests the excavation practices property owners describe were not confined to a single site.

For the property owners at Jewels Dunn’s River, the practical stakes are direct: a beach that draws tourism revenue and supports property values sits downstream, literally, of a highway construction project whose environmental oversight, on the available record, appears to have repeatedly fallen short of what regulators required, leaving affected owners asking the contractor itself, rather than the government that approved the project, to pay for putting it back.

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