Jamaica’s Building Code Was Finished in 2009. It Still Wasn’t Law by 2018

• The technical building code was completed in 2009
• A bill was first tabled in Parliament in 2011
• It was still in draft form after Hurricane Matthew in 2016
• A New Building Act finally passed, but full enactment lagged

Strict adherence to Jamaica’s proposed building code can be a significant buffer against earthquake and hurricane damage, Jamaica Institution of Engineers president Dwight Ricketts said at the organisation’s 2018 Engineers’ Week opening, timing his remarks against both a forecasted active hurricane season and a 4.6 magnitude earthquake that had struck Jamaica days earlier. His membership, he said, hoped for speedy enactment of a modern building code, work the New Building Act passed that year had only just paved the way for.

The gap between technical readiness and actual law had, by then, already run nearly a decade. The technical work on the Jamaica National Building Code, modelled on the International Building Code, was completed and handed over to government in 2009, according to Roosevelt DaCosta, the electrical engineer who led that work. A building bill was first tabled in Parliament in November 2011 under then Prime Minister Bruce Golding, and had still not passed by October 2016, when Hurricane Matthew’s 145 mph winds struck neighbouring Haiti and brought renewed urgency to Jamaica’s own stalled legislation. By that point, the bill had undergone several drafts, DaCosta said, with the latest a 2016 version awaiting the Chief Parliamentary Counsel’s finalisation before debate.

A Gleaner letter writer captured the frustration directly amid that delay: the government must enact the legislation currently under review, he wrote, arguing Jamaica should not have to face another hurricane with the outdated code still in force, and that there appeared to be neither the political will nor a real push to get it done. He had specifically observed shoddy design offering inadequate wind resistance and continued construction in flood- and mudslide-prone areas, the exact failures a modern code was meant to prevent.

The pattern, a technically complete code sitting unenacted for years while successive storms make the case for it, echoes what this publication has documented in Jamaica’s electronic land titling reform, promised in 2018 and not actually contracted until 2025. The Bureau of Standards has continued refining specific technical standards since, including a 2026 draft standard for hurricane impact resistance testing, work that, on the pattern established by the building code itself, may take years past its technical completion to become anything more than a draft.

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