TEMA is now say­ing To­ba­go may need an­oth­er six weeks to ful­ly re­cov­er from Hur­ri­cane Beryl.

To­ba­go Emer­gency Man­age­ment Agency (TEMA) Di­rec­tor Al­lan Stew­art ini­tial­ly pre­dict­ed a month, but yes­ter­day he said more time was need­ed as on­ly 50 per cent of home re­pairs were com­plet­ed.

Ac­cord­ing to TEMA, there were 247 re­ports of land­slides and oth­er is­sues in­clud­ing 57 vil­lages af­fect­ed with re­ports of 75 fall­en trees, 41 dam­aged roofs and 15 road­blocks.

Nine homes were struc­tural­ly dam­aged and sev­en fam­i­lies were dis­placed when the hur­ri­cane passed to the north of To­ba­go be­tween June 30 and Ju­ly 1.

In a tele­phone in­ter­view yes­ter­day, Stew­art said the team was ex­pect­ed to sub­mit a re­port to the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly with­in a week on how the is­land will man­age the re­main­ing struc­tur­al re­pairs.

“I would not say that things are back to nor­mal. What we have is a sit­u­a­tion where the re­lief ef­forts went quite well. How­ev­er, the re­con­struc­tion of some premis­es based on the as­sess­ment that has been con­duct­ed, it re­vealed some of the homes need the in­put of the Di­vi­sion of Set­tle­ment,” he ex­plained.

Since the as­sess­ment was still on­go­ing, Stew­art could not pro­vide a cost for the de­struc­tion caused by the hur­ri­cane.

He said an en­gi­neer­ing as­sess­ment was need­ed to re­pair some of the homes.

“To do these works will re­quire lengthy in­put of about six more weeks of work to get done. The pro­cure­ment process of get­ting the ma­te­r­i­al is de­layed. That is a chal­lenge we are fac­ing now,” Stew­art added.

—Eliz­a­beth Gon­za­les