Derek Achong

The Min­istry of So­cial De­vel­op­ment and Fam­i­ly Ser­vices is ex­pect­ed to be­gin dis­trib­ut­ing dis­as­ter re­lief grants to vic­tims of this week­end’s floods by the end of the week.

So­cial De­vel­op­ment Min­is­ter Cher­rie-Ann Crichlow-Cock­burn made the an­nounce­ment while ad­dress­ing me­dia per­son­nel at a joint press con­fer­ence at the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty in Port-of-Spain yes­ter­day

She said: “Our ex­pec­ta­tion is that be­fore the end of the week we should be in a po­si­tion to start pro­vid­ing those per­sons with grants.”

At the time of the press con­fer­ence, Crichlow-Cock­burn said her min­istry’s staff mem­bers were able to con­duct dam­age as­sess­ments at 227 homes in Manuel Con­go, Green­vale and La Hor­quet­ta where flood wa­ter had sub­sided. By Sun­day af­ter­noon, the min­istry was on­ly able to con­duct 31 as­sess­ments in St He­le­na, which was among the worst-hit com­mu­ni­ties.

Crichlow-Cock­burn said that staff mem­bers of her min­istry were ex­pect­ed to re­turn to that com­mu­ni­ty and oth­ers in San­gre Grande, Cunu­pia and To­co as floods con­tin­ued to re­cede. The T&T Guardian was un­able to con­firm if their work was ham­pered by ad­di­tion­al heavy rain­fall yes­ter­day af­ter­noon.

Crichlow-Cock­burn re­vealed that the Gov­ern­ment had de­cid­ed to split the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of is­su­ing the grants be­tween her min­istry, the Min­istry of Hous­ing and oth­er Gov­ern­ment agen­cies.

She ex­plained that the Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (HDC) would be deal­ing with $15,000 grants for per­sons whose HDC units in La Hor­quet­ta, Green­vale and Orop­une Gar­dens, which suf­fered struc­tur­al dam­age.

Oth­er per­sons, whose homes suf­fered such dam­age, would have to ap­ply for the grant through the Min­istry of Hous­ing in con­junc­tion with the Na­tion­al Com­mis­sion for Self Help.

She said her min­istry would process $10,000 grants for dam­aged elec­tri­cal ap­pli­ances and fur­ni­ture and $20,000 grants for elec­tri­cal and plumb­ing re­pairs.

Pri­ma­ry school pupils who lost all their school sup­plies in the flood will re­ceive $700, while sec­ondary school stu­dents will re­ceive $1,000.

“This has been done in an ef­fort to fast-track the process and make it more speedy,” Crichlow-Cock­burn said as she claimed that the split­ting of re­spon­si­bil­i­ty would re­duce bu­reau­cra­cy.

While she ad­mit­ted that Gov­ern­ment would not be able to com­pen­sate cit­i­zens for all their loss­es, Crichlow-Cock­burn sug­gest­ed that the grants would have a pos­i­tive cu­mu­la­tive ef­fect.

“In these cir­cum­stances what the Gov­ern­ment tries to do is help you to come back to a lev­el of nor­mal­cy. There is no way that the Gov­ern­ment could cov­er the en­tire cost of the re­pairs,” she said.

Stat­ing that she was aware that some vic­tims were forced to dis­card dam­aged items be­fore the as­sess­ments are com­plet­ed, Crichlow-Cock­burn as­sured them that the min­istry had de­vel­oped a method to com­plete the process in the ab­sence of the items.

“One re­quire­ment nor­mal­ly would be that we want to see these items, but recog­nis­ing the sit­u­a­tion we are in, we have iden­ti­fied a num­ber of mark­ers that we can use to do the as­sess­ments,” she said.