Former CDEMA head makes suggestions at forum
The construction of shelters to handle rising sea levels and the creation a leadership roundtable to share disaster preparedness and management best practices with new governments.
These were just two of several suggestions Disaster Resilience Advisor with the University of the West Indies (UWI) Jeremy Collymore put forward following Hurricane Dorian’s devastating impact on the Grand Bahama and Abaco islands.
Making a presentation to the UWI Vice Chancellor Forum on Hurricane Recovery in the Bahamas, Collymore, the former head of the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency said it was necessary to go to the drawing board to design infrastructure which could handle these events as they were becoming more common.
“I would like to suggest that we use our legacies and competencies in the environment and in the nature of the challenge faced in rising sea levels et cetera that we consider design of a prototype shelter that takes consideration of these emerging extreme events and make it available to the government of the Bahamas to inform the development of shelter facilities in these impacted spaces. We could consider going to another stage to involve the private sector and design professionals in this exercise,” he stated.
Collymore also said that with several organisations and agencies having expressed their willingness to support UWI in the recovery process of the Bahamas, such partnerships should be explored going forward.
In addition, he noted that best practices should be easy for new Caribbean leaders to access.
“If we do not get to the change in the leadership at the top, it will be a bottleneck between the application and practice. We have observed that a number of our leaders in recent times have had to deal with these crises and we are proposing that in that context that we organize through the UWI and the Caricom Secretariat and others a leadership roundtable for crises and extreme event which would allow sharing among the leaders and to frame a tool that can be used by other leaders that have not been impacted and provide a document for good practices that can be shared with new leaders and new cabinets,” he added. (JMB)