Build It Right. Build It to Remember. Black River Deserves Both.

Kingston, Jamaica, 2 March 2026

The argument for patience in rebuilding Black River is well made by those closest to the work. The mayor of Black River and the member of parliament for St Elizabeth South Western have both urged restraint against the temptation to rush, and that caution is defensible. Haste makes waste is a sound principle in construction, and the consequences of rebuilding Black River in the wrong location, to the wrong standard or with the wrong street pattern would be felt for generations. The call for patience deserves to be heard. It also deserves a response.

That response is this: patience has a cost, and that cost is being paid, right now, by the businesses that have not reopened, the families that have not been rehoused, and the commercial operators who are making permanent decisions about their futures while temporary decisions are described as work in progress. The case for patience in planning does not entail indefinite silence on specifics. It requires the opposite: clear interim measures, transparent timelines for the decisions that have not yet been made, and genuine engagement with the people whose livelihoods and properties are at stake in those decisions.

What Must Not Be Lost

What Hurricane Melissa took from Black River in terms of physical structures is not recoverable. The 188-year-old Anglican church, Waterloo House, Magdala House and the Victorian-era commercial buildings that lined High Street and the waterfront are gone. Rebuilding better and more resiliently does not require pretending otherwise, and it does not require replacing what was there with something that bears no relationship to the town’s three-century history. The most compelling version of a rebuilt Black River is one that makes the new town worthy of the old one, not one that erases the memory of what stood there before the storm.

Hurricane Melissa, ranked among the strongest Atlantic storms in recorded history, is now part of Black River’s story. The Zong Monument that survived the storm, the ruins of the courthouse visible on High Street, the memory of what was lost and the community that endured it: all of these are now part of the heritage of a town that was already deeply layered with history. The rebuilt Black River should not merely reference that history. It should be shaped by it, in the design of its public spaces, the naming of its streets, the preservation of whatever artefacts survived and the deliberate inclusion of the storm’s legacy in the identity of what rises from it.

Building for the Next Storm, Not Just From the Last

The single most important lesson of Hurricane Melissa for Black River’s reconstruction is one that the government has stated publicly but that needs to be embedded in every specific design decision that follows: the rebuilt town must be built for the next storm, not simply as a recovery from the last one. That means buildings designed to Category 5 specifications, coastal defences engineered for sea-level rise projections over the next 50 years, utility systems with genuine redundancy, and a land use framework that keeps the most exposed positions away from the densest residential and civic uses.

A restored Black River that reflects its rich history and the defining impact of Melissa will not be a replica of what existed before. It will be a living town that has absorbed the lessons of its most catastrophic event and made them permanent, not just in the construction of its buildings, but in the planning of its land, the design of its infrastructure and the character of its public life. That is the standard against which the rebuild should ultimately be measured.