The Kingston and St Andrew Municipal Corporation is developing a landslide awareness programme for the municipality’s high-risk areas, working with the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management and the Mines and Geology Division, Mayor of Kingston Delroy Williams told the Senate during the State of the Nation Debate, according to the Gleaner.
The programme follows a collaborative slope-instability study with the University of Chester, Mines and Geology, and ODPEM, and builds on detailed geotechnical investigations that go beyond the active landslide at Shooters Hill to cover the wider Kingston Metropolitan Area. Williams said the resulting susceptibility mapping identifies a number of areas with a high probability of failure, provided there are triggers from heavy rainfall or earthquake activity, exactly the combination that has caused damage in the KMA repeatedly.
The practical output is meant to feed directly into land use planning: maps, imagery and databases from the project are now available to the KSAMC to inform zoning and policy decisions, rather than sitting in an academic report. Williams was explicit that buildings in landslide-prone areas need to be designed and constructed with suitable mitigating features, and that both the sustainability of such structures and their environmental impact demand real consideration before approval, not after a failure.
For a buyer or developer working in the KMA, the practical implication of a public susceptibility map is straightforward: due diligence on a hillside site is not only a matter of retaining an engineer, it is now also a matter of checking whether the specific parcel falls inside the zones the KSAMC and ODPEM have already flagged as high-probability failure areas.
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