The new­ly ap­point­ed Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer (CEO) of the Of­fice of Dis­as­ter Pre­pared­ness and Man­age­ment (ODPM) re­tired Ma­jor Gen­er­al Rod­ney Smart is call­ing on cit­i­zens of T&T to do­nate to the Ba­hamas and al­so to pre­pare for this Hur­ri­cane Sea­son.

“Please pre­pare your­self, please pre­pare your fam­i­ly, please pre­pare you com­mu­ni­ty,” Smart said.

“This hur­ri­cane sea­son is a very ac­tive one,” he said.

Smart spoke with the me­dia on Fri­day where he said this coun­try is not pre­pared for a hur­ri­cane like Do­ri­an which was a Cat­e­go­ry 5 hur­ri­cane that bat­tered the Ba­hamas ear­li­er this week.

“We in T&T must take the lessons from what has hap­pened in the Ba­hamas,” Smart said.

He made the com­ments on Fri­day when he vis­it­ed the Foun­da­tion for the En­hance­ment & En­rich­ment of Life Re­lief Dis­tri­b­u­tion Cen­ter which is one of the col­lec­tion cen­tres for Ba­hamas do­na­tions.

“We must now rise to the oc­ca­sion and re­al­ly give to our neigh­bours” the ODPM CEO said.

The first Ba­hamas bound ship­ment will leave on Sun­day 8th Sep­tem­ber and oth­er ship­ments will leave the next two Sun­days af­ter that.

“That’s three flights that we have sched­uled to leave that will take do­na­tions to the peo­ple of the Ba­hamas,” said CEO of FEEL Ele­na Vil­lafana-Sylvester.

Vil­lafana-Sylvester said there are dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories of items need­ed and a do­na­tion col­lec­tion cen­tre at every car­di­nal point which can be found on the ODPM’s web­site, or on FEEL’s Face­Book page FEEL.

Some of the cen­tres in­clude FEEL - Fer­nan­dez In­dus­tri­al Com­pound, Min­istry of Trade and In­dus­try – Barataria, Ad­ven­tist De­vel­op­ment and Re­lief Agency - St Au­gus­tine, Uni­com­er Ware­house - Uri­ah But­ler High­way, Achie­vor En­ter­pris­es Ltd - San Fer­nan­do and the To­ba­go Emer­gency Man­age­ment Agency.