Ja­maicans have been told to brace them­selves for an ex­tend­ed pe­ri­od of dry weath­er as a re­sult of the re­cent­ly end­ed La Niña weath­er phe­nom­e­non.

Dur­ing La Niña pat­terns, wa­ter tem­per­a­tures in the At­lantic, Caribbean and Gulf of Mex­i­co are usu­al­ly warmer than av­er­age and up­per-lev­el winds, which tend to tear sys­tems apart, are less hos­tile. Wa­ter tem­per­a­ture de­par­tures from av­er­age in the Pa­cif­ic Ocean. This re­sults in de­creased cloud pro­duc­tion and rain­fall in that re­gion.

“We will just be com­ing out of the La Niña weath­er phe­nom­e­non, where over the last three to four years, we have had the ben­e­fit of wet­ter con­di­tions. The next three to four years we are like­ly to have the dif­fi­cul­ty of deal­ing with dri­er con­di­tions. It is why we have been in­vest­ing at an un­prece­dent­ed rate,” said the Min­is­ter with­out Port­fo­lio in the Min­istry of Eco­nom­ic Growth and Job Cre­ation, Matthew Samu­da.

Samu­da, speak­ing on a ra­dio pro­gramme here, said last year, the gov­ern­ment in­vest­ed four bil­lion dol­lars (One Ja­maica dol­lar=US$0.008 cents) to up­grade the in­fra­struc­ture of the Na­tion­al Wa­ter Com­mis­sion (NWC).

But he told ra­dio lis­ten­ers that even with these in­vest­ments, the ac­tions of cit­i­zens are crit­i­cal as the is­land con­tin­ues to ex­pe­ri­ence ex­tend­ed drought con­di­tions, re­sult­ing in dwin­dling wa­ter sources.

Samu­da said the crit­i­cal­ly low wa­ter lev­els at the Mona Reser­voir and the Her­mitage Dam in Kingston and St. An­drew have again prompt­ed the call for mem­bers of the pub­lic to prac­tise strin­gent con­ser­va­tion mea­sures.

“Cit­i­zens need to un­der­stand, cer­tain­ly in the east­ern end of the is­land, that the Mona Reser­voir is at 32 per cent ca­pac­i­ty and the Her­mitage (Dam) sys­tem is at 37 per cent ca­pac­i­ty, so we are in a dire sit­u­a­tion,”

Samu­da said that the NWC will be en­forc­ing its Pro­hi­bi­tion No­tice, which be­came ef­fec­tive on May 26, pre­vent­ing the use of potable wa­ter for non-es­sen­tial pur­pos­es.

“We have put for­ward these pro­hi­bi­tion no­tices. We are hop­ing for moral sua­sion. We will be en­forc­ing, but we are hop­ing that all cit­i­zens will take heed and will hold their neigh­bours ac­count­able for us,” he said.

KINGSTON, Ja­maica, CMC