Nearing the end of September weather experts were predicting that hurricane Matthew could potentially be devastating for a number of countries, and within a relatively short time it proved to be immensely destructive particularly for Haiti, but it has also seriously affected the lives of many in other Caribbean states, like The Bahamas, and several states along the south-eastern coast of the USA.
As Matthew rumbled through the Caribbean region and America’s southeast, it was rain, not wind that did the most damage, resulting in record flooding. According to the experts, even a mild-mannered Category 1 or 2 hurricane can prove catastrophic if it produces enough rain.
While Hurricane Matthew did not pose a threat for us in Guyana, we continue to have regular experiences with flooding, the worst of which occurred back in 2005, and we continue to be at risk of the rising sea levels as our Georgetown coastline is below sea level. In fact, we are vulnerable to mere bad weather in our capital as well as in our interior areas and farming communities. All this means that disaster mitigation must be a crucial part of our national planning.
It is therefore encouraging that the Civil Defence Commission (CDC) is hosting a six-day Mass Casualty Management Training Workshop this week with stakeholders from the relevant sectors including the Ministry of Health, emergency services, the fire service and the police.
Director General, CDC, Colonel (Ret’d) Chabilall Ramsarup, addressing the forum earlier this week, observed that the Casualty Management System is focused on saving life and limb, and to ensure that the injured are treated properly. This workshop follows recent efforts to establish Regional Disaster Risk Management Systems (RDRMS).
This attention to the RDRMS is important as is the casualty management system, but the real challenge for the government and the CDC is convincing citizens that adequate steps are being taken to ensure that, as a country, we are ready for the next big threat.
For far too long, every year, like clockwork, farming communities along the Mahaicony River suffer immense flooding, causing loss of crops, livestock, and livelihoods. This state of affairs has not been aggressively combated by the various state agencies that might have oversight, and any exacerbation of this recurring flooding can easily see unnecessary loss of human life in addition to the losses that currently obtain.
In the mining communities, we have seen increased rainfall resulting in a higher number of pit collapses with several persons being killed as a consequence.
In June this year, when severe flooding brought disaster to Region Five villages, we observed the vulnerability of our communities in the face of natural disasters once again. At the time, public criticism again zeroed in on the government’s inability to handle any sort of major crisis.
Already there is an understanding among the citizenry that hurricanes like Matthew are not likely to reach our shores because of the realisation that our real protection from natural disasters lies more in our geographical location than in our capacity for disaster mitigation.
Nevertheless, frequent flooding disasters and droughts across the country are crippling the economic stability of farming communities and negatively impacting our national output and trapping farming communities, and those dependent on them, in hardships and poverty in some instances.
Since taking office in 2015 the government has given a commitment to protect people, property, livelihoods and infrastructure through significant investments in the longer term, but current disaster preparedness planning has frankly failed to win the confidence of citizens especially those residing in the regular flood hit areas.
Given the increased risks with the change in temperatures and rising sea levels it is now a matter of priority that government adequately addresses the state’s preparedness to meet the challenges of the extreme flooding that occurs around the country every year, in order to extend hope that our CDC and related agencies and bodies can actually respond with a level of effectiveness in the event of a major natural disaster, or indeed, a man-made one.
It has become the unflattering norm, in a country with a relatively high literacy rate, that important matters are dealt with only in the initial conceptualising phase and rarely make it to the actualising phase, making Georgetown a real candidate for the “talk shop” capital of the world.
Recently, the CDC was granted $55.7M in supplementary provisions to further enhance its disaster response mechanism and operations. While this information was shared it is still not clear what the budgetary allocation for the Commission was and the information regarding how that money is spent is not readily available.
Further, do people know where the emergency shelters are in each of our ten administrative regions? Why is our CDC’s main operation housed only a short distance from the seawall which is regularly overtopped by waves at high tides? How do the CDC and the military, and the police, and emergency services, and essential services integrate and interact in the event of an emergency? Where is the “Situation Room” located for such an intense operation requiring the integration of so many agencies? How is this Control Centre staffed; and how adequate are the technological and other resources with which it must function?
Or do we wait until the need for an evacuation arises to identify a few schools closest to hard-hit areas? Do people know what relief services are available in the various regions? Have we integrated our services to ensure that emergency shelters can also provide health services? Do we have medical personnel trained for treating a deluge of injured and sick?
Some years ago, the PNCR which is the main party in the APNU-led coalition government, had called for a review of the CDC’s operations by a non-partisan professional group to determine its performance and capabilities. Such a review is still critical, but these “white papers” must not be an end in themselves. Guyana is sitting on a ton of reviews and reports and commissions of enquiries abound, all costing countless millions, but no effective action is ever taken.
This talk shop approach must end if we are ever going to leave anything of substance to future generations.
The remit of a civil defence authority is usually to combat the negative effects of disasters resulting from wars and weather-related or other naturally occurring calamities, e.g. earthquakes, tsunamis etc. Without a true natural disaster on the record, successive governments of Guyana are failing the people by not providing adequate and sustainable emergency services and essential services that can combat in a systematic manner, the routine excesses of weather that every country must deal with on a regular basis. The reason for this might be the political culture that drives political parties to do only enough to warrant re-election every five years.
This lack of serious long term planning and the actual executing of visible capacity development in every sphere of operations in this country, including the military, police, medical systems, essential services, emergency services, and also the Civil Defence Commission, has left us very vulnerable in a rapidly changing world. The sea level along the coastline is said to be rising, the political stability of important countries of the world is at its lowest in current history, yet our geographical location continues to be the only real defence that we as citizens depend on in times of impending disaster.
