Last night, we told you about the start of the 2016 Hurricane Season, which is projected to have 16 named storms. Well, the City Emergency Management Organization is ready to act, if any of those storms should make landfall in Belize.
Today, the CEMO managers held a press briefing to outline their contingencies for all categories of storms:
Phillip Willoughby - City Council, CEMO
"Whenever we hear the term emergency management, emergency planning, yes you hear at the head from NEMO then normally you would hear directly from myself and it would always me making these comments. So this time around I want you to hear directly from the experts who will be directly responsible for providing the actual safety, the actual ground work."
William Mason - Belize Medical Technology
"We have been invited many times to come out and provide the technical services like drone services, medical services and various different forms of evacuation services for the people within those areas. We have managed to have tremendous success with our team about 25 volunteers and we've always been known as being the guys who is on the scene any time as the first responder. We're fully equipped with all kinds of equipment; we have about 4 generators right now, lighting capacity to light up a place like a football field. We're ready to mobilize with our drones services as well."
Tirso Galvez - Operations Officer, Dept. of Transport
"One of the situations is that time is of the essence and so evacuation must be on a timely basis from the time we have been given the warning or the advice from NEMO. Of course with the consent of the Chief Met, the Chief Met is the key person who gives that direction first and then the national emergency committee then gives us the instruction when to start evacuation. There is also the first advisory which is basically the voluntary evacuation and then the secondary is where government provides that means of transportation."
Flood mitigation is major part of the storm response, and
the 20 million dollar flood mitigation project on the northside contributed meaningfully to that. But, the Mayor says that some city residents are already dumping garbage in places that the Flood Mitigation Project funding was used to clean out. Today, he made a plea to Belize City residents to consider the consequences of such a destructive behaviour:
Darrell Bradley, Belize City Mayor
"We talk about emergency management; we talk about flood mitigation and climate change. We and counsellor Willoughby under scored the dollar value in terms of the millions of dollars spent in flood mitigation. Yesterday I had a meeting with the IDB together with representatives from various departments of the city council and they emphasize the point that many of the canals that were recently cleared are becoming clogged again because of the proliferation of garbage. So that one of the things that they recognize in terms of sustainability of the project and handing the project over to the Belize City Council in terms of the 2 million Belize dollars’ worth of equipment and the assets that have been upgraded to the tune of 10 million US dollars. All of those initiatives will be wasted if we do not have that level of public responsibility. One of the areas of focus was right in the vicinity of Holy Redeemer Primary School and they emphasize they amount of garbage that is being thrown back into recently cleaned and upgraded canals and you're talking garbage not small, you're talking about refrigerators because they did a walk through and assessment and we need in this society to really emphasize the point of citizen responsibility."
"I know that Dr. Zuniga will endorse this idea in relation to how important it is with issues of public health and the importance of preventing something as serious as Zika. So that the discussions that we're talking about are not unrelated to other issues affecting our country and we really need to underscore the importance of individual behaviour."
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