Thursday, October 12, 2006

by Dawn Roper

Jamaica (Panos), KINGSTON: Local bauxite company, Jamaica Alumina Company (JAMALCO), has committed to completing land reclamation work in the mined-out areas of Mocho, Clarendon by the end of 2007.

“We have a job to do and we will do it,” said Timothy O’Driscoll, Mining Manager at JAMALCO while addressing a meeting with residents of Mocho at the Mocho Community Centre on Thursday, September 28, 2006. He and Brian Doy, JAMALCO’s Manager of Public Affairs, Communication & Government Relations, were on hand to update residents about the company’s plans for the area, now that mining is no longer done there.

But land reclamation was not the only pressing issue to the residents. One resident appealed to JAMALCO to restore the community water tank, damaged during mining. Another requested help for the Mocho Primary School. Another resident appealed for the delivery of a land title to the relatives of a man, now deceased, whom JAMALCO resettled about fifteen years ago. The damaged roads and poor drainage were also sore points.

O’Driscoll acknowledged JAMALCO’s responsibility without going into detail about the reasons for the company’s delay in honouring its commitments to the community.

“We are accountable. We need to be held accountable. There are some things that should have been fixed, and I have said it before, a long time ago. But they haven’t been (done) and we now have to fix it. We’ve tried to deliver. We’ve tried to do the task. I could sit here and try to apologise. I don’t think it’s going to serve us any purpose now.”

He said over the past month JAMALCO has been having “extremely cordial” meetings with residents individually and in groups, and the company is now ready to act on the results.

“Courtesy and understanding, and patience, have certainly been shown, particularly by the people who have come in to see us. And I really do think that we are going to solve a lot of the issues that are outstanding for the persons,” O’Driscoll said. “We have the results of the discussions with various people. We are going to hand them to the folks we had the discussions with.”

He did not give a definite time frame in which the problems would be addressed, but did indicate that JAMALCO was ready to act. Referring to JAMALCO’s office in Four Paths, Clarendon he said that the office was specifically set up to get results.

“Results, hopefully that you and folks in your position - those of you who’ve got issues around land, around resettlement, around commitment, around payment, around compensation - will be able to say, ‘Yes, that is what you said you were going to do and that’s what you did.’”

The community has long been advocating for the bauxite company to address some of its burning issues including proper reclamation of mined lands, settlement options for residents and contribution to the overall development of the community.

At the late September meeting, Brian Doy responded to questions about Mocho’s drainage and roads. He said that an engineer was commissioned to look into the drainage situation in Mocho, but “somewhere along the road it stopped.”

“It’s a long-standing issue,” he added. “But we are dealing with it.

“We also know that we have some work to do on the construction of the roads. The roads are appalling. You couldn’t describe them any other way. We would have to put a plan in place to get them up to standard,” Doy said.

JAMALCO mined bauxite in the Mocho, Clarendon for over 30 years before mining ceased there in 2003.

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