Den­nis Pan­tin

My worst fears and sus­pi­cions seem to have been con­firmed, in terms of Trinidad and To­ba­go's lev­el of nat­ur­al dis­as­ter pre­pared­ness, based on an ed­i­to­r­i­al in the March 20 Ex­press, which cit­ed Col George Robin­son, CEO of the Of­fice of Dis­as­ter Pre­pared­ness and Man­age­ment (ODPM), as not­ing the fol­low­ing:

First, the ex­ist­ing dis­as­ter man­age­ment pol­i­cy is 32 years old, and re­quires ma­jor re­vi­sion. Sec­ond, schools which would be the des­ig­nat­ed emer­gency cen­tres are in­ad­e­quate for such tasks. Third, there are on­ly ten peo­ple trained as ur­ban search-and-res­cue pro­fes­sion­als in the coun­try. Col Robin­son was pes­simistic about the time frame for im­ple­ment­ing new leg­is­la­tion, and al­so sim­i­lar­ly skep­ti­cal over find­ing the nec­es­sary re­sources. The ques­tion that all of this begs is where will the mon­ey come from?

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This ques­tion?can be turned on its head by ask­ing where will the mon­ey come from if we do not build re­silience now and, God for­bid, we get a se­vere earth­quake or hur­ri­cane. Could we then end up in a sit­u­a­tion like Haiti, with?cat­a­clysmic ef­fects in terms of? ex­ces­sive and un­nec­es­sary?loss of life; the wip­ing out of the hous­ing stock and now vir­tu­al com­plete de­pen­dence on the rest of the world to get it back to some sem­blance of nor­mal­cy? (This in a con­text where, as more coun­tries ex­pe­ri­ence calami­ties of a sim­i­lar kind, "dis­as­ter fa­tigue" sets in in terms of ex­ter­nal sup­port.) The point is that if we have time–but not to waste–and if we spend as re­sources per­mit, we could even­tu­al­ly ar­rive at the lev­el of pre­pared­ness com­pa­ra­ble to a Japan or a Chile with­in?10-15 years, in terms of their lev­el of earth­quakes pre­pared­ness (with hur­ri­cane and cli­mate change readi­ness thrown in for good mea­sure!).

Low-hang­ing fruits

We need to im­me­di­ate­ly in­crease the num­ber of search-and-res­cue trained pro­fes­sion­als from 10 to 100, if not 1,000. This is un­like­ly to be ex­pen­sive if it draws on the same pool of Reg­i­ment, Coast Guard, Fire Ser­vice, SRPs, the Red Cross and oth­er vol­un­tary ser­vices. We could re­quest train­ing sup­port from coun­tries with al­ready es­tab­lished rep­u­ta­tions in such pro­grammes, in­clud­ing Cu­ba, Japan, the State of Cal­i­for­nia and, per­haps, Chile, in time. Sec­ond, the US$200,000 to $1.3 mil­lion re­quired by the Seis­mic Re­search Unit for ad­di­tion­al earth­quake mon­i­tor­ing equip­ment could prob­a­bly be found by giv­ing up a week or two of pro­pa­gan­dis­tic, waste­ful gov­ern­ment ad­ver­tis­ing. Third, new up-to-date leg­is­la­tion ought to be pri­ori­tised on the first track of the leg­isla­tive agen­da.

Cit­i­zen fund­ing via loans or tax breaks

Un­doubt­ed­ly, wide­spread retro­fitting of pub­lic and pri­vate build­ings will be an ex­pen­sive un­der­tak­ing. The ul­ti­mate re­spon­si­bil­i­ty and cost will have to be borne by those who ben­e­fit: name­ly the house­hold­er and all via im­prove­ments in the readi­ness of pub­lic build­ings. To fi­nance this will re­quire loans or tax breaks to in­di­vid­u­als, to­geth­er with some grants. Op­tions in­clude float­ing dis­as­ter pre­pared­ness bonds, draw­ing on the ex­cess liq­uid­i­ty in the sys­tem, as well as ex­ter­nal bor­row­ing. Per­son­al loans will have to be on man­age­able terms and, there­fore, would need to most like­ly take the form of "soft loans" at low in­ter­est rates with "longish"' re­pay­ment pe­ri­ods. Some­thing will have to give: op­por­tu­ni­ty costs in terms of fore­go­ing oth­er projects.

This pro­posed dis­as­ter pre­pared­ness plan, there­fore, can­not be con­sid­ered in iso­la­tion of the coun­try's over­all fis­cal debt-bear­ing ca­pac­i­ty and oth­er pri­or­i­ties which need to be ad­dressed, in­clud­ing the state of?the coun­try's wa­ter and health sys­tems in par­tic­u­lar. There are a num­ber?of?grandiose projects in the pipeline which would need to be post­poned, if not can­celled, since they al­ready may be push­ing debt sus­tain­abil­i­ty over the edge. In par­tic­u­lar, the mono­rail and wide­spread high­way ex­pan­sion. In their place we should be us­ing low­er cost op­tions for ad­dress­ing the trans­porta­tion prob­lem. Op­tions in­clude flex­i­ble work­ing hours. Some or­gan­i­sa­tions al­ready give their em­ploy­ees op­tions of start­ing work at 7, 8 or 9 am, there­fore re­liev­ing the 8 am stress.

(The Sun­day Guardian of Feb­ru­ary 28 cites USA stud­ies re­port­ing pos­i­tive health ben­e­fits ac­cru­ing from giv­ing work­ers sim­i­lar op­tions.) An­oth­er no-cost op­tion is work­ing from home on some days of the week. Many peo­ple spend hours get­ting to work to sit in front of a com­put­er. They could be do­ing the same thing at home with In­ter­net and tele­phone con­tact with their man­agers. A?third op­tion is a ded­i­cat­ed bus route,?suc­cess­ful­ly in­tro­duced in sev­er­al oth­er coun­tries al­ready. A fourth op­tion is de­cen­tral­i­sa­tion of gov­ern­ment and even pri­vate sec­tor ser­vices, such that peo­ple don't need to go to on­ly two-three avail­able ur­ban ser­vice cen­tres, but have a wider range of choice. If we quick­ly adopt such a nat­ur­al dis­as­ter pre­pared­ness strat­e­gy, we can gen­uine­ly claim to be on the road to de­vel­oped coun­try sta­tus!