Dire straits

Mon, Oct 5th 2015, 12:35 PM

Hurricane Joaquin has exposed critical weaknesses in our country’s emergency management system. It has also highlighted a level of incompetence among some of our leaders that should worry us all. To be clear, Prime Minister Perry Christie deserves to be commended for ensuring that Opposition Leader Dr. Hubert Minnis was included as a part of the team that traveled to assess the damage from the storm. We also commend Minnis for having a mature response and joining the team.

This was an important signal to the nation that in times of disaster, politics must be set aside. But Christie did not send a message to the country that he viewed the crisis with any sense of urgency when he attended two funerals before boarding a flight after 3 p.m. on Saturday to lead the assessment. No disrespect is intended to the dead, but in times of crises, leaders must lead. They must also be seen to be leading. We do not make that observation as a political statement.

As Minnis pointed out at the end of the brief assessment trip on Saturday, Joaquin did not discriminate based on who wears red and who wears yellow.

In the wake of Joaquin, the immediate concern is getting relief to the many residents affected in Long Island, Crooked Island, Acklins, Rum Cay, San Salvador and other areas that bore the brunt of the storm’s wrath. There was poor communication by the authorities, and poor coordination. But before we go further, we acknowledge, there were also some bright spots.

Deputy Prime Minister Philip Brave Davis, for instance, had a serious and effectively organized relief effort to his constituency. He flew out both Saturday and Sunday, carrying critical supplies.

Long Island MP Loretta Butler-Turner was in the air early on Saturday, flying over her constituency. She immediately became engaged in a weekend-long relief effort, helping to coordinate to ensure critical supplies got to storm victims. Still, there is a lot of anger over this storm and the official response to it.

While the priority at the moment is rightfully relief efforts, it is also important to dissect the emergency management response. Critical mistakes were made. We must learn from them. Many people were caught off guard by Joaquin. Many are blaming the government. Some are blaming the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA); others are blaming the media.

Development

In assessing what went wrong, the swift and dramatic development of the storm should be taken into account. Unlike other storms, Joaquin did not give The Bahamas significant notice from the time it developed as a tropical depression, to the time weather experts recognized it was a threat, to the time it barrelled across portions of The Bahamas, mercilessly hanging around until it had fully spent its fury.

“This is one of the fastest developing cyclones I have ever seen in my career,” said Michael Stubbs, a local meteorologist.

The tropical depression that grew into the monster storm formed in the Western Atlantic last Sunday near Bermuda. On Sunday, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) in the United States issued its first advisory at 11 a.m. At the time, the storm was not expected to strengthen much in the next 48 hours.

On Monday at 11 a.m., NHC advised that the system strengthened to a tropical storm and was named. Joaquin was forecast to strengthen further. On Tuesday morning, the system remained a tropical storm. Throughout most of Tuesday, it was not projected to have any major impact on The Bahamas. Joaquin was not yet in the national consciousness.

On Wednesday morning, government officials and opposition MPs made strong statements in the House of Assembly warning residents that the storm ought to be taken seriously and that they ought to rush to complete preparations. Many people of course were not plugged into Parliament live. They were going about their day-to-day business. Throughout the day, NEMA sent multiple advisories as the storm strengthened.

At 4 p.m. on Wednesday, NEMA held a press conference to re-emphasize those warnings and to provide updated information. Director of NEMA Captain Stephen Russell said his team had reached out to all Family Islands to ensure all relevant agencies and residents were prepared for the storm. He urged those on Family Islands, who had already been affected by flooding and surges, to evacuate immediately. But somehow that message did not seem to get out to all the Family Island communities that needed to hear it. In some cases, island officials did not act on the message. Russell said NEMA issued a request at 6 p.m. on Wednesday for all shelters to open.

Guardian Radio was providing hourly updates on the storm. On Thursday, The Nassau Guardian and The Tribune led with the storm being a major threat. By then, Joaquin was already impacting parts of the Southern and Central Bahamas.

On Thursday afternoon, the prime minister led a live news conference at NEMA headquarters. It was not his finest moment. While Christie urged residents to prepare, for many it was already too late. They were already being hammered. In some areas like Acklins, shelters were not open.

Acklins Administrator Harvey Roberts told us he did not anticipate such intense conditions.

“I did not open the shelters, not here in the central area where I am,” Roberts said.

“It just came unexpected. We did not think it would get like this.”

On Thursday, the outrage being felt by some residents on various islands of The Bahamas matched the storm’s intensity. At the press conference in Nassau that day, Christie did not demonstrate the level of seriousness one would expect from a prime minister at such a critical time. There was no clear statement from him. He rambled. He stumbled.

He seemed unprepared and at points seemed from his expressions that there was something to joke about. He was followed by Commissioner of Police Ellison Greenslade, who gave viewers a lesson on national TV on how to use a walkie talkie. It was embarrassing really. It would have been comical were it not such a serious matter.

After we learned of our investment in state-of-the art communications from the police chief, Russell, the NEMA director, suggested there were communication challenges and some officials on the Family Islands may not have been in place. As the disaster unfolded late Thursday and Friday, the media and the general public struggled to get critical information.

The last update on NEMA’s Facebook page was September 24, 2014. We learned from someone (not an official) who happened to be at the Office of the Prime Minister on Friday that the prime minister was meeting with members of the disaster preparedness team. We raced to his office in time to get reports from the authorities. By then, it was difficult in some respects and impossible in other respects to establish communication with people on the affected islands. Telephone systems were down.

Aftermath


On Saturday morning, as Joaquin moved away from The Bahamas we scrambled to try to determine what the authorities’ plan was to assess damage and organize relief. It was difficult to learn that from anyone. A call to the prime minister’s press liaison, Elcott Coleby, was fruitless. He had no idea if the prime minister was traveling to assess the damage or if the media could accompany the nation’s leader. Coleby promised a return call, which we never got.

The word from people close to Christie was that he was attending funerals. No one seemed to know what was going on, not even the NEMA director. We sent our news teams to the Nassau airport hoping that our officials would be kind enough to allow us to tag along on their assessment. The prime minister arrived around 3 p.m. and allowed our team to travel with him.

Onboard that assessment flight were government officials, NEMA officials, other disaster preparedness officials and key stakeholders, and the media. They did a flyover of San Salvador, Rum Cay and Deadman’s Cay, Long Island. They were unable to land in Deadman’s Cay because the airport there was under water. The plane landed at Stella Maris in North Long Island. A defense force aircraft also flew in to Long Island with some relief supplies.

As the prime minister and his team attempted to assess the damage, the police jeep the prime minister and the opposition leader were traveling in caught a flat tire. They headed back to the airport and left Long Island, not having seen much. After a brief stop in Exuma to refuel, the assessment team headed back to Nassau.

Christie and the others did not have much to report. There was no statement from NEMA all day Saturday as rumors of 30 deaths on Long Island intensified. The commissioner of police said later in the day such reports were not confirmed.

On Saturday night, we still did not have a clear idea of how residents in South Long Island were faring. A U.S. Coast Guard helicopter, in a trip arranged by the Office of the Prime Minister and NEMA, did not leave Nassau for South Long Island until around 3 p.m. yesterday. Christie and other officials left again yesterday afternoon to continue their assessments. While Joaquin’s rapid strengthening did not give authorities a lot of time to get their message out, it is clear that there were critical failures in ensuring the necessary preparations were made for the storm and an effective response was made to the disaster.

Overall, the response was chaotic and disjointed. We should learn important lessons from this storm, all of us. When the dust settles and the storm victims are back to some semblance of normalcy, all stakeholders, including the media, should be included in a post mortem so we do not repeat the mistakes of the past week.

Click here to read more at The Nassau Guardian

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