The Waterfall That Once Was

On Roaring River/Mammee Estate

Roaring River Falls, 1985

Sometime in 1985, well before my environmental life began, I learned that the Roaring River in St Ann was going to be diverted from the hydroelectric plant it serves at Laughing Waters, and the Roaring River falls would flow once more, which they had not done since the plant was built. As a child and teenager, I loved nearby Dunns River Falls, especially the area above the falls where few visitors would venture. What we thought were crowds back then would be considered an empty day today. There were stairs and basic bathrooms and a railing or two, but the vegetation was natural and there was no need for rubber shoes, because the rocks were not slick with algae. But I had never seen Roaring River Falls, so I headed off with my then husband and seven-year-old son.

I knew where the turn off to the Roaring River Great House was, because I had been there once for a party. An older man at the gate to the property kindly directed us towards the falls, warning we should look out for grass lice. 

As I remember it, there was a faint trail, sometimes through old pastures in ruinate, sometimes through forest. Soon I could hear the rush of water and we came to a place where the river flowed through trees and outcrops of vegetation. The falls were only just visible through the trees, which must have grown up after the river was taken – ‘realigned’ as the consultants call it. Roaring River was once a series of waterfalls in tiers, like Dunns River – I found an old black and white photo in a cousin’s photo album and took a picture of it with my phone.

Roaring River, Harris family photo, undated

We swam in the river, my son and me, my ex in a bad mood and refusing to join us, the day falling into the category of ‘Diana’s damn foolishness’. I take no pleasure in reporting that he was the only one who got grass lice.

I’m writing about this now, because that place, Roaring River/Mammee Estate, 160-odd acres, part of the Rio Bueno Watershed Management Unit, White River Sub-management Unit, is about to be the latest sacrifice to modernity, to we-love-south-Florida development, to jobs-jobs-jobs. Land there has been used as part payment for the construction of the North-South Highway by China Harbour Engineering Company (CHEC) and now there is to be an upscale housing development of 834 units, inhabited by about 4,000 people.   

Can I bear to look at one more Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), I ask myself now? Those tedious documents, running to hundreds of pages, chock full of cut-and-paste language, dispassionate descriptions, lists of species which, we are told, will joyously move elsewhere, the table of impacts and mitigations which all involved know will not be carried out, the listing of the inadequate and unenforced laws, the international agreements and treaties Jamaica has signed, the few sentences exploring alternatives and cumulative impacts? Can I bear it?

Okay. Deep breath. I take a look at the EIA on the website of the Never Ever Protecting Anything agency, NEPA, a piece of my brain thinking about the Pinnacle Phalluses, recently announced for Reading, near Montego Bay, four 28-storey high rises, adjacent to the MoBay Marine Park. No EIA for them, apparently. Focus, brain. 196 pages without the Appendices. Appendices: 379 pages. I start with the Appendices, move on to the EIA itself. Renderings of the buildings, apartments, bungalows, all modern, all generic, paying no homage to the site itself. Dense, crowded, urban. Drawings of a ‘lagoon’ which turns out to be a retention pond for increased runoff due to the conversion of forest to concrete. The drainage report, pages of tables. I start wondering what will happen to the sea frontage, which does not appear to be part of this project. The site is ‘traversed by a number of natural waterways’ and there is the expected mention of ‘realignment’ and ‘river training’. Interestingly enough, there’s a picture of the siltation in the sea caused by the construction of the North/South highway, no date given. A warning, of sorts.

Archaeological excavations were done with a backhoe – I must say I did not realize that was how such work was done – British colonial artifacts were uncovered, and this is an old Taino site. Sections of the land had already been cleared.

51 species of birds of which 15 were endemic, secondary forest in good health, 14 species of amphibians, 17 species of reptiles, 108 plant species, 43 of which were trees, five of those endemic, 10 species of bat. Moths, butterflies, bromeliads, epiphytes. The distribution and abundance of species, the EIA notes from heights of indifference, were greater in the forest.

The risks are described as the removal of ‘large tracts’ of existing flora, said to be ‘imminent’, and there could be destruction of undiscovered heritage sites. And here is the expected response to ‘displacement of fauna’ – ‘… most of the  fauna species recorded are adapted to disturbance and, in most cases, would be temporarily displaced and will more than likely relocate to adjacent blocks of land outside of the development footprint and could even return after the initial phases of the project.’

The Executive Summary of the EIA concludes that the environmental impacts are understood and can be mitigated, and this large, upscale housing development in a healthy forest, teeming with organisms, part of a watershed area, with abundant fresh water is a suitable use of the site because in the St Ann Development Order of 2000, the area was not specifically zoned.

Recently I read a report on Jamaica’s forest cover and it said that there was recovering forest on the old cane lands. This is probably what happened to Roaring River/Mammee Estate, once a sugar plantation with all that implies, left alone for decades, and now there is healthy forest, which we are willing to destroy while we are fed palliatives of tree planting and landscaping as replacements for the complex organism that is a forest.

I don’t know how to end this piece. I could write about access, about one more piece of our natural and historical heritage denied to most of us, or the things the people of St Ann need – affordable housing, attention to traffic, more reliable water supplies, connection of many properties to the sewage treatment system, better schools and hospitals. But I want to make the case for the intrinsic value of what is there, the forest, the water, the plants and animals. As I stare at my computer screen searching for words, a recent video of Blue Hole (or Blue Lagoon as it is now more commonly called) in Portland comes to mind. I did try to embed it here, so you could see it, but I failed. It was a video forwarded on WhatsApp of that deep blue hole in the sea on the coast filling with concentric and expanding circular plumes of grey silt. Otherworldly and sinister. Blue Hole is fed by underground freshwater springs, but I had never seen those springs run anything but clear. After I reposted the video on social media, I was contacted by well-known free-diver David Lee, who told me the phenomenon was not all that unusual in fact, and given the torrential rain Portland has experienced recently, it was to be expected. This was followed by an Instagram reel sent to me by KD Henry, that showed two men hiking through sparse forest to what was called by the narrator ‘the most dangerous place in Jamaica’. The men looked down into the abyss of a sinkhole, vertical sides, no bottom visible. One man explained this feature feeds into Blue Hole far away on the coast. The other threw a plastic bag of garbage into the sinkhole.

And words come to me – we don’t care to understand connections. The freshwater springs in the hills which make their way to the sea, nurturing the forest on the way, the thousands of small lives that live among those trees, producing fertile soil, pollinating fruit and flowers, the plants that form the base of complex food webs, producing the food we eat, the role of nature in regulating temperature, cycling carbon, absorbing our waste products, including carbon dioxide, which has shifted the global climate out of the benign conditions that birthed our civilization. We know where the sinkhole goes, and still we choose to throw our garbage into it.

Roaring River/Mammee Estate’s fate was settled a long time ago. I know that the EIA is an expensive formality, that this outcome was always inevitable, the only uncertainty being the timing. And that despite the environmental rhetoric by government ministers of all persuasions, they, we, would not choose to protect those connections, not even to try to understand them, not if there was a dollar to be made, a ground breaking to attend, a photo op to use.

The spectacular waterfall at Roaring River was destroyed for a power plant before there were such things as Environmental Impact Assessments. I wish I could believe that would not happen today. But I don’t.