Illegal mining a threat to Bernard Lodge development, PM says
Published:Friday | August 5, 2022 | 12:08 AMAlbert Ferguson/Gleaner Writer
WESTERN BUREAU:
ILLEGAL SAND mining is creating challenges for the Greater Bernard Lodge Housing Project, now under way in St Catherine.
Prime Minister Andrew Holness, who has ministerial responsibility for the environment in the Ministry of Economic Growth and Job Creation, said that while the development of the area is progressing nicely, illegal mining poses a problem even more so now that it is attracting, and being spearheaded in part by, players from the criminal underworld.
The Bernard Lodge development, which spans a total of 5,397.02 acres, has been earmarked for the construction of 15,000 to 16,000 housing solutions, with approximately 1,300 acres of land reserved for small and medium-size farmers.
The development will result in an improvement in infrastructure, including the provision of potable water, sewerage, waste management, drainage, road rehabilitation in Greater Portmore, aquifer protection, and the regularisation of agricultural lots.
“I have seen the effects of illegal sand mining, for example, in the Bernard Lodge area, where huge holes, craters, have been left behind on land which is slated for development,” Holness said.
“Now, those holes are [a] great challenge to our water table in that area,” he said of the former sugar estate. The Bernard Lodge development is moving ahead quite nicely and where we can, we are refilling those areas and preventing illegal mining from taking place.”
The prime minister made the revelations during a recent tour of the Great Bay community in southern St Elizabeth, where approximately 100 metres of sand were illegally removed from private property, which exposed residents, their homes and commercial assets to the risk of flooding from heavy rainfall.
“The challenge is that oftentimes, these illegal operations which take our natural assets and profit from them, are also sometimes tied to the criminal underworld, and so we have to be careful of that as well and break that nexus,” he lamented.
According to the prime minister, part of the country’s challenge with illegal mining has to do with lands that are sitting idly. “They are not being policed. People are finding surreptitious ways of getting onto the lands without regulations, without oversight, literally ripping up and destroying our natural assets.”