7 News Belize

Making The Most OF Disaster Preparedness
posted (April 18, 2013)
This afternoon at the Radisson, Godwin Hulse the Minister in Charge of Emergency Management briefed the media about the highlights coming out of the Regional Disaster Preparedness technical advisory committee meeting organized by Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency - CDERA.

Hon. Godwin Hulse – Minister of National Emergency Management
"Some of the highlights coming out of today's meeting were, still ongoing as you know, but there's the strategic direction was endorsed. That is where we are going from 2013 to 2018 and so there was a tremendous amount of discussion there that was endorsed and so that now goes up to council. The country's support program was examined and supported. A country support program means for example; What will Belize get? What the other agencies will get? That was also was discussed and then of course the operational planning enhancement. How we are going to move in all of these changes that are happening? We looked at communications systems and that sort of thing; the world is a changing place. You know, couple years ago we sent a mail and we would hope you got it and then from there we sent you a 'telex' and the we started sending you a fax and then we got cellphone and now we have facetime. So we are going up. So communication is changing and how we interact and communicate with each other. In between all of that, a myriad of smaller issues so fundamentally that is where are and what we have been doing so far."

Ronald Jackson - Executive Director CDERA, Caribbean Disaster Emergency Response Agency
"The documents that were observed, endorsed, reviewed, and commented on really focused on a number of areas including the capacity strengthening of countries. Noting that countries are the ones that are impacted. They are the first line of response and so one of the things we are doing at CDERA is mobilizing resources towards improving the capacity of our offices, of our Nemos, of our National Disaster organizations as they are called in different countries to be able to deal with that first line of response. It looked at also of building capacity for response. So going back to your question about the hurricane season; strategically we are looking at how we are going to be supporting at country level but also the regional level to mobilize the kind of support external of countries who are impacted if they call on CDERA. It looked at the whole area of resource mobilization in this time of fiscal tightening and resource shortages."

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