ACS general sec: Harvey’s damage to Texas could affect Caribbean

She said that some 43 per cent of the people affected by the hurricane are Hispanics and there is a significant Caribbean diaspora in Houston made up of persons attracted by the energy sector.

She said the widespread devastation and shutdown of oil and gas installations has rendered those people unemployed and will mean a reduction of remittances to the region to support their families.

Soomer made the comments in an interview with Newsday after the official opening of the 25th meeting of the Special Committee for Disaster Risk Reduction held at the ACS Secretariat, Sweet Briar Road, St. Clair.

She said that before taking up the post at the ACS, she was St. Lucia’s ambassador to CARICOM and the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) and had responsibility for diaspora affairs and during that period a number of meetings were held in Houston which were attended by St. Lucian and other Caribbean populations.

“And we have a number of people in the region who went to Houston through St. Croix and the oil industry and many of these people remit money to the Caribbean, so I am sure that there will be a major impact on the remittances because of the fact that there is unemployment right now in Houston and the focus is on disaster recovery.

Hopefully, there will be a return to normalcy very soon so that we will see our Greater Caribbean people employed again to help their people at home.” During the meeting, the Director of Transport and Disaster Risk Reduction, Arturo Lopez-Portillo, presented a report on the various projects being undertaken by the ACS in Trinidad and Tobago and the region to improve the readiness of various institutions to deal with natural disasters as well as the organization’s work programme for 2017- 2018 and beyond.

However, Soomer said that while the ACS is involved in several projects to help the region build capacity to prepare for storms and hurricanes, “We think that we can do a little more because our aim is to help countries rebuild better and if we are able to move into these countries very quickly when they are rebuilding (after a disaster, we can) show them what standards they should use.” She hastened to add that because of the number of hurricanes which have hit the region the countries have very good systems in place. “But we want to see less lives lost. We have countries where people are still dying during a storm and one of the things we want to insure is that we give them the information, we help them to build the capacity to make sure that we have that impact on the ground during a storm.” She said the ACS works very closely with the civil defence system in Cuba which she said was very good, reflecting that she could not remember the last time someone died in a storm in Cuba because of the methods that they use.

She said the ACS wanted to share some of those techniques with its member states.

In her opening remarks to delegates attending the meeting, Soomer said the ACS empathised with people around the world who are feeling the ravages of climate change. She added, “In our own region, we recall the frantic search for hundreds of missing people after the southern city of Mocoa in Colombia was engulfed by a huge landslide of mud, rocks and gushing waters that swept away homes and cars and killed more than 200 people in April.” She said that the people of the Greater Caribbean are right now living through the torrential rainfall brought by hurricanes, tropical storms and tropical depressions.

While the ACS has a number of projects in Trinidad and Tobago and in several countries of the region and wider region, Soomer said the organisation wanted to have more impact on the ground because while it finishes a project, sometimes it is very difficult to judge the impact on the ground because this is not built into the project.

“So we are going to build that impact on the project because we want to ensure that our work will affect and better serve vulnerable populations especially such as women, young people, children, people with disabilities, people we forget.

We think that it is ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to a disaster, but there are certain groups that are more affected and we have to be able to respond more quickly.”