Jamaica Promised to Relocate This Flood Village in 2004. It’s Still There, 20 Years and Two Storms Later

• Government ordered relocation after Hurricane Ivan in 2004
• No alternative site was ever identified
• Beryl flattened homes there again in 2024
• Residents are still hoping to finally move

Alvernia Johnson-Rhoden and her mother, Janet Sinclair, are sheltering in the one habitable room of Johnson-Rhoden’s home, after Hurricane Beryl tore the roof from her house and flattened her mother’s three-bedroom residence entirely in Portland Cottage, Clarendon, a flood-prone coastal community. Sinclair, 68, who lives with a hearing impairment, partial blindness and speech challenges, lost all her possessions in the storm. The two are, in Johnson-Rhoden’s words, simply thankful their lives were spared.

The disaster is not Portland Cottage’s first. Twenty years earlier, Hurricane Ivan struck the same community with category four force, destroying wooden homes and killing eight people in Ivan-related incidents nearby at Rocky Point. Two days after that storm, then Minister of Land and Environment Dean Peart ordered a cease-and-desist against anyone rebuilding in Portland Cottage, announcing government plans to permanently relocate residents from flood-prone areas, explicitly citing the rising cost of repeatedly restoring the same communities after each disaster. Peart acknowledged at the time that no alternative relocation site had actually been identified. Resident Winston Crawford told the Gleaner then he was ready to move: If dem can get a better place fi wi, wi will go. No problem.

Twenty years, and evidently no completed relocation, later, Beryl found the same community in the same place, still vulnerable to the same coastal flooding the 2004 order was meant to end. Clarendon absorbed 133 of the parish’s homes destroyed outright by Beryl, with a further 617 severely damaged and 493 with minor damage, 1,243 residences affected in the parish hit hardest by that storm.

Portland Cottage’s two-decade wait sits alongside a broader pattern this publication has documented in Jamaica’s post-disaster housing response: commentary from planner Christopher Burgess after the later Hurricane Melissa argued international disaster recovery benchmarks call for permanent housing within 12 to 24 months of a storm, a standard Jamaica has repeatedly missed by years, not months, for its most vulnerable coastal communities. A cease-and-desist order and a public commitment to relocate proved, in Portland Cottage’s case, considerably easier to issue than an actual new site was to deliver.