Garbage and rats over-running Hanover, HMC councillors frustrated
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Western Bureau:
Councillors at Thursday’s sitting of the Hanover Municipal Corporation unleashed their collective fury about the state of garbage collection in the western parish, blaming the latest rat infestation on the numerous piles of uncollected waste across the parish.
“We are lucky that the public health department has not come across more incidents of leptospirosis in this parish,” said Andrea Dehaney-Grant, the deputy mayor of Lucea and Councillor for the Sandy Bay division, in expressing her personal disgust with the situation.
Dehaney-Grant, who chaired the meeting in the absence of Mayor Sheridan Samuels, made her observation after the tabling of the National Solid Waste Management Authority’s (NSWMA) report for the month of May, which stated that 31 districts were left with uncollected garbage during the month.
After the tabling of the NSWMA’s report, the councillor challenged the accuracy of the report, which broke down the affected communities as 14 in Hanover Eastern and 17 in Hanover Western. According to the councillors, many more communities were affected as garbage was only collected along the main thoroughfares in the parish.
“All we hear is that this truck is broken down and that truck is broken down. Why is it that we cannot get two new trucks to clean the garbage within Hanover?” Dehaney-Grant asked the NSWMA representatives.
According to Dehaney-Grant, Hanover is always in the top three [parishes] when it comes to paying property tax, while noting that garbage collection is one of the services being paid for by property taxes.
She also stated that a rodent eradication programme that the Ministry of Health and Wellness, through the Hanover Public Health Department, had launched some months ago, was being undermined by the non-removal of the garbage.
“What has happened is that a number of new illegal garbage dumping sites have popped up across the parish, because the legal dumping sites are not being cleared, and the residents have started to dump their garbage elsewhere,” remarked one councillor, while another councillor chimed in that the complaints about bad roads has been replaced by complaints about garbage.
“I cannot recall us at the HMC having a conversation with the NSWMA to commend them that our communities are clean and ‘thank you’, and I believe that that has been the situation long before I joined this corporation,” said Dehaney-Grant, in arguing that the NSWMA is always complaining about trucks not working.
“I do not see any solution in sight… . It seems that all the trucks servicing Hanover are old. If an individual moves from the Chester Castle division to the Green Island division at the other end of the parish, all the divisions are packed with garbage.
“So, no matter what amount of rat bait is set by the health department there will always be rats, because of the simple fact that there are always piles of uncollected garbage in the communities,” she added. “Every other organisation within the parish is trying to improve their performance, but the NSWMA just keeps going backward.”
Sharmaine Anderson Gayle, president of the Hanover Chamber of Commerce, who attended the meeting, also expressed her organisation’s concern about the garbage situation. She said the chamber will be writing to Local Government Minister Desmond McKenzie and the head of the NSWMA about the situation.