St. James Central DEO seeking to fill all spots

ONE of the goals of the St. James Central District Emergency Organisation Chairman is to ensure that they fill all of the spots of damage assessors and other roles that they have, so that they would have a full complement before the 2018 hurricane season begins.

This was revealed by Chairman of the St. James Central District Emergency Organisation (DEO), Selwyn Brooks, at one of their meetings recently at Queen’s College.

He said that they currently have more than 70 spots available within St. James and they only have 30 spots filled at the moment, “which means that we have a long way to go”.

In fact this was one of the reasons why the meeting was held, to garner the interest that residents have in becoming a part of the DEO.

“There were three focus areas that we had wanted to touch on this evening. The first one was to ascertain those persons who were assigned as damage assessment officers in the past to try to determine if they are still interested because once there is no impact, sometimes people can become complacent. The second one was if there were any persons – and there were invitations extended – who wanted to be involved in the process, that they could come and we would have additional persons.

“The third focus of today’s meeting would be to inform persons of upcoming training and simulation exercises that we want to do, which would give persons refresher knowledge and the capacity to fulfil what they want to do and lastly, it is our intention to fill every vacancy of damage assessor in the parish of St. James.”

He continued, “So this is the first in a series of proprietary meetings that we want to roll out to increase – I would say the excitement or the enthusiasm – so that persons can be aware of what damage assessment is all about and the role that they play.”

Brooks said that such training is important, since Barbadians tend to be reactive when it comes to things like disaster management.

“Yes, they are very much reactive and the problem in being reactive is that if you are not trained or know what to do, you are more likely to do the wrong thing or to create further problems by your reaction… A trained person would tend to act. An untrained person would react.”

He would also like to see more interest being shown by Barbadians in this area. “I do not think that Barbadians are as interested as they ought to be. You would have heard me say that disaster management is nothing sexy or there is nothing catchy about it. People only get involved in it when there is an impact. But I always share the view that you spend the money two ways – you either spend the money and the time before or you spend the money and the time after. It just happens that some persons would not have the money to spend after.”

This is the first meeting that they have held for 2018 and more meetings are likely to be held, especially as the hurricane season approaches, he added.