Preparing for disasters

The silver lining on these clouds was that no one was injured and no lives lost. This was partly because the rains, although heavy, never became the kind of intense downpour that leads to flash flooding. This allowed people to make some sort of preparations, which at least secured life and limb. But significant property damage occurred, while, as always, farmers were the hardest hit. Some lost entire crops, others some small livestock, and the floods may have ruined land due to be planted over the next few months. So consumers can brace themselves for continued high food prices over the Christmas and Carnival seasons.

These floods also served as a repeated warning to the authorities and to citizens about how unprepared this country is for a natural disaster. The weekend rains, substantial as they were, were quite mild compared to the kind of rainfall that comes with a storm or hurricane. The depression that caused the rain also did not bring with it the kind of strong winds which do the most damage.

The Government has given the assurance that flood control measures are being put in place, and that citizens should start seeing results in three years. Nobody is holding their breath, however, for the populace has been hearing such noises for the past 40 years — and the three-year timeframe most recently mentioned places concrete results nicely beyond the next scheduled general election in 2007. Still, even if the Government is really using the boom dollars to finally put effective engineering solutions in place, flood relief won’t happen any time soon. What this means is that the authorities must, in the interim, place greater emphasis on the other side of the equation — helping the victims of natural disasters.

The Office of Disaster Preparedness and Management (ODPM) is the key agency here. Clearly, only so much can be done in terms of preparedness. The vast majority of homes and buildings in this country are not built to withstand even a mild hurricane or medium-scale earthquake. And, whenever there is a hurricane warning, the sudden long lines at groceries show that citizens do not even take the basic precautions of having adequate supplies of tinned food, matches, candles, batteries, flashlights, and first-aid kits.

So the emphasis has to be on management. The response of the ODPM and the various protective services over the past few days suggests that procedures have been much improved since the threat of Hurricane Ivan earlier this year revealed fundamental shortcomings in the systems. This last weather system was actually, to use an inappropriate term, a nice dry run for the authorities. Hopefully, all the relevant parties will perform a post-mortem on their operations, looking to see what areas have to be improved. This is especially crucial given that a more ferocious weather system will do far more damage and be much more dangerous. But the response seems to be more effective than it was, and this must be built on before the next disaster strikes.