Chair­man of the Of­fice of Dis­as­ter and Pre­pared­ness Man­age­ment (ODPM), Dr Stephen Ram­roop, says his or­gan­i­sa­tion is con­cerned about T&T's abil­i­ty to han­dle a ma­jor earth­quake.Ram­roop made the state­ment on Sun­day dur­ing a com­mu­ni­ty-out­reach tour of ar­eas in Diego Mar­tin and Pe­tit Val­ley that were se­ri­ous­ly af­fect­ed by flood­ing and land­slides in Au­gust, last year. "We are re­al­ly wor­ried about the earth­quakes," Ram­roop told the T&T Guardian dur­ing the tour."A re­cent re­port com­ing out of Glob­al Plat­form for Dis­as­ter Risk Re­duc­tion says that T&T has one of the high­est risks for earth­quakes."

Ram­roop rep­re­sent­ed T&T at the con­fer­ence, which was held in Gene­va, Switzer­land, in May."If we have an earth­quake it is go­ing to mess up our coun­try and it will cost hun­dreds of mil­lion of dol­lars to re­ha­bil­i­tate our pri­vate sec­tor and ur­ban ca­pac­i­ty, which we have de­vel­oped in re­cent years," Ram­roop said.He ex­plained that the coun­try was well pre­pared for hur­ri­canes and storms, but ad­mit­ted it is not equipped for earth­quakes."We are bet­ter off deal­ing with a hur­ri­cane or storm be­cause they both give you a warn­ing. When an earth­quake or ter­ror­ist at­tack strikes you don't have time. It hap­pens sud­den­ly," Ram­roop said.

Ram­roop said that the ODPM cur­rent­ly had six ship­ping con­tain­ers that were filled with emer­gency sup­plies, in­clud­ing food, beds and clean­ing equip­ment, which could be trans­port­ed to com­mu­ni­ties with­in an hour of a dis­as­ter.He not­ed that while equip­ment and sup­plies are im­por­tant, the ODPM is now fo­cus­ing on com­mu­ni­ty-readi­ness for dis­as­ters through its Com­mu­ni­ties Or­gan­ised and Ready for Emer­gen­cies (CORE) pro­gramme.He said the pro­gramme seeks to de­vel­op a cul­ture of "com­mu­ni­ty-based re­silience" in T&T.

"Ev­i­dence all over the world has shown that no mat­ter what you do, or how ready you are, it is the com­mu­ni­ty readi­ness that is very im­por­tant," Ram­roop said.Dur­ing Sun­day's tour, Ram­roop and dozens of vol­un­teers vis­it­ed scores res­i­dents who were af­fect­ed by last year's flood­ing. The dam­age caused by the flood­ing was es­ti­mat­ed to be more than $100 mil­lion.First aid kits and wa­ter-in­flat­able bags were dis­trib­uted to the res­i­dents. Of­fi­cials al­so as­sessed each house­hold's lev­el of dis­as­ter pre­pared­ness and gave sug­ges­tions for im­prove­ments.ODPM of­fi­cials al­so met with the res­i­dents to dis­cuss their (res­i­dents') per­son­al ex­pe­ri­ences of last year's flood­ing, which, Ram­roop said, would as­sist in the de­vel­op­ment ad­di­tion­al na­tion­al dis­as­ter man­age­ment strate­gies.