The Parottee Predicament: Stay, Rebuild or Leave?

Parottee, St Elizabeth, 13 December 2025

More than five weeks after Hurricane Melissa, the coastal community of Parottee, a few kilometres south-east of Black River, still resembles the aftermath of a catastrophic event. Battered and demolished houses, disturbed and partially submerged graves, and debris scattered across what was once a functioning fishing and residential community define the landscape. The scale of destruction has prompted officials to question openly whether rebuilding in Parottee is a viable proposition. The answers emerging from within the community are divided, and the tension between those who want to stay and those who feel they cannot return safely is one of the most difficult human dimensions of the post-Melissa recovery.

The parish manager for the Ministry of Labour and Social Security in St Elizabeth, who has been conducting damage assessments across affected communities, has highlighted Parottee specifically as an area where rebuilding intent among residents presents a challenge to the recovery effort. Families who have indicated they plan to rebuild are doing so, in some cases, on sites that experts describe as extremely vulnerable to future storm surge and sea encroachment. The assessment teams are working through what is the right support to offer, knowing that providing rebuilding assistance on sites assessed as unsustainable may be compounding long-term risk rather than resolving it.

A Husband and a Wife, Two Different Answers

The human complexity of the relocation question is captured in a single household in Parottee where a husband and wife, surveying the ruins of their concrete house and the five graves nearby, some submerged and shifted by the sea, hold opposing views. The husband says he plans to leave. He suffered a stroke in a hurricane shelter and returned to Parottee for the first time since the storm to find his house gone. He does not intend to rebuild where he is. His wife’s position is different. She does not know where the government would relocate them, she does not know what would happen to the family’s land, and she is not leaving the community where she was born and grew up. The graves of her relatives are there, however disturbed. The land is hers, in the only way that matters to her.

These are not irrational positions. They are the positions of people navigating catastrophic loss without a clear framework to guide them. The government’s assurances that no family will be left worse off by relocation are meaningful as intent. They become meaningful as fact only when specific answers are provided to the specific questions that families like this one are asking: where will they go, what will they receive for their land, what will their new home look like, and what will become of the relationships, livelihoods and community ties that their current location sustains.

The Property and Land Rights Dimension

The question of what happens to the land that coastal families leave behind is not incidental to the relocation process. In Jamaica’s legal framework, compulsory acquisition requires fair compensation, and the valuation of properties in areas like Parottee, which have sustained catastrophic damage and where continued habitation may be officially discouraged, is a genuinely complex exercise. Informal tenure holders, those without registered titles, face an additional dimension of uncertainty about whether and how they will be compensated for land they have occupied for decades but do not formally own.

For the families of Parottee, the stakes of getting this right are not abstract. The land they occupy is, in most cases, the sum total of their generational wealth. How it is valued, how their replacement housing is chosen, and whether the process is conducted transparently and with genuine community consultation will determine not just where they live but what they own, and what their children inherit. A meeting with residents of Parottee was being planned by local elected representatives for early 2026 to begin the process of explaining the way forward. The quality and honesty of that conversation would matter enormously.

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