“I Tried a Thing”: A 73-Year-Old Tailor Nailed Zinc to His Own Roof After Melissa

• Chensie Allen rode out Melissa protecting his sewing machines
• He received $500,000 under the government’s ROOFS programme
• Holness has warned against rushing to convert to slab roofs
• A collapsed slab roof can be deadly in an earthquake

Seventy-three-year-old tailor Chensie Allen stayed inside his Savanna-la-Mar home through Hurricane Melissa specifically to protect his sewing machines, the tools of his trade. The storm blew down houses around him before it finally took his own roof. I was hoping to ride it out and escape it, so I stayed in the house because I was protecting the machines, he said. Afterward, unable to find an available carpenter with everyone in the parish equally overwhelmed, he improvised: I tried a thing, pick up some zinc and nail them on the roof to ease the pressure over my head.

Allen was among 4,741 Westmoreland residents to receive a payment under the government’s ROOFS programme, part of a $787.5 million parish-wide disbursement, accepting a symbolic $500,000 cheque at a ceremony in Savanna-la-Mar. His plan for the rebuild reflects a shift playing out across storm-hit communities: this time, I would like to build concrete instead of board and zinc, he said, a decision echoed widely enough that western Jamaica cement demand has surged as homeowners abandon zinc roofing for reinforced concrete.

That shift has drawn an explicit caution from Prime Minister Andrew Holness rather than unqualified encouragement. I know that there are many Jamaicans who will be saying no more zinc for me, I’m going totally slab, he said at a press conference. Before you think about slabbing your roof, make sure that the structures can support it. Holness instructed the Ministry of Local Government to launch a public information campaign on the engineering requirements for slab roofs specifically, warning that while slab roofs resist extremely high winds, a collapsed slab roof, which can occur during an earthquake, is deadly, you don’t want to replace one disaster with another.

For someone like Allen, an older tradesman rebuilding on a fixed grant after losing his roof and improvising a temporary fix with his own hands, that caution matters as much as the underlying trend it’s aimed at: the safer material choice after a hurricane isn’t automatically the safer choice overall, and getting the structural engineering right, not just the switch from zinc to concrete, is what actually determines whether the next rebuild survives the next disaster, whichever kind it turns out to be.