Audit ordered as Westmoreland running out of burial space

WESTERN BUREAU:

With burial spaces running low and backyard interments escalating in Westmoreland, Councillor Ian Myles has ordered an audit into the operations of the 12 public cemeteries in the parish.

Myles, chairman of the Civic and Community Development Affairs Committee (CCDAC) of the Westmoreland Municipal Corporation, said that the cemeteries lacked basic amenities. All of them, said Myles, had no running water.

The councillor remarked that Tate Cemetery had approximately 500 spaces left, Sheffield was filled to capacity, and that others were following suit.

Myles, who represents the Little London division, argued that a cemetery audit could guide the municipality in managing burial grounds in the future.

“They lack organisation. Most times they start to bury from the front of the cemeteries, blocking the roads that are supposed to take you to the back of the cemeteries,” Myles told The Gleaner.

“It’s creating a lot of problems.”

According to Myles, the audit of will be carried out by a team of technical personnel from the municipal corporation, the public health department, and the councillors with oversight of the divisions where the cemeteries are located.

Myles said he ordered the audit based on the reports from the councillors in the various divisions.

He also raised concerns about the alarming increase in the number of persons who are requesting permission for backyard burials.

“There has been a rapid expansion in home burials and we want to move away from that as a parish, so we have to ensure that the cemeteries we have are of a certain standard where persons can feel comfortable,” said Myles.

The steady depletion of burial spaces in Westmoreland is not unique to that parish, as a 2019 Sunday Gleaner investigation indicated the scale of a national crisis.

Data showed that Jamaica, at that time, had only a quarter of the minimum designated land space it should have for burying the dead. Environmental and planning officials urged more families to choose cremations over burials.

At the time, the country had 712.6 acres of dedicated burial space available, which represented 26 per cent of the 2,700 acres of land that should exist, according to benchmark standards outlined in the National Environment and Planning Agency’s Development and Investment Manual.

That development bible dictates that there should be 100 acres of cemetery space per 100,000 residents.

While every parish is running a major deficit, St Elizabeth (9.3 per cent), St James (10.3 per cent), Westmoreland (12.7 per cent), and Clarendon (14.4 per cent) had the worst four ratios in the differential between existing land capacity and the acreage needed for burials.