The Office of Disaster Preparedness and Management (ODPM) has announced that it will be testing its evacuation plans for Port-of-Spain, San Fernando and Tobago on July 15, 16 and 17. There are plans ahead for other areas such as Princes Town and Arima and there are systems in place to co-ordinate strategy with the 14 regional corporations to expand the network to the entire country. These exercises will represent the first full test of a strategy to ensure that citizens can escape these heavily populated areas in an orderly, safe and effective manner. It's arguable whether an exercise announced days in advance of a planned evacuation drill will reflect any of the realities of panic, distress and confusion that are likely to accompany any natural disaster that might endanger heavily occupied areas of Trinidad and Tobago, but some testing of the plan's broad outlines will clearly be necessary to evaluate the strategy.
Announcing the exercises, Dr Stephen Ramroop, CEO of the ODPM noted that the region may well face as many as 18 storms and six hurricanes between mid-year and the end of the rainy season in December. Ramroop's strategies seem sound and sensible and hit all the gracenotes that previous leadership teams at the ODPM rang during their efforts: Effective liaison with response agencies; engagement with regional corporations warehoused supplies and involvement with supermarkets and national shelters. These elements have been part of the language spoken by the ODPM since its formation, but the words have found little presence in reality on those occasions when the ODPM has been called on to perform its critical role in harnessing the emergency response capacity of this country to the task of assisting persons in dire need.
An early warning was sounded by Port-of-Spain Mayor Louis Lee Sing who expressed concerns about the absence of the school system from active engagement in the evacuation plan for the city. Expressing "pity" about his inability to get a response from the Minister of Education for as long as five months, Lee Sing warned: "Port-of-Spain is blessed with 52 schools and his [The Education Minister's] role in so far as to whether children should go home or not is crucial in the event that a natural disaster or a major flood confronts us." The Port-of-Spain Mayor is, of course, justifiably concerned about the 250,000 people that are estimated to be in the city during every working day along with the students of the schools that fall under his purview, so it's surprising to hear that his entreaties to the Minister of Education have gone without response.
The ODPM is likely to encounter more cases of both wilful and inadvertent recalcitrance in its efforts to execute on its duties, and it must be ready to make suitable entreaties to those in authority, with whom it must be expected to deal as peers, to engage in the national thrust to disaster preparedness. The ODPM is also planning to use its experience with these exercises to fine tune its disaster response plans to the point where they can serve as templates for every township and village across the nation, with each community developing the base plan to one that's adaptable to their geography, threat level and circumstances. A fully developed and tested disaster plan has been a long time coming in Trinidad and Tobago and the ODPM must not depend on these public tests of its response strategy to carry its message forward to the population at large.
The "sensitising of the public," as the ODPM CEO put it, must occupy a more prominent and robust place on the agenda of the agency than it has formerly. Beyond the planned drills and engagement with the regional corporations, the disaster preparedness coordinating agency must develop compelling and informative communications interventions that will drive home to citizens what's required of them in emergency situations, repeating and varying the delivery of the message until it becomes ingrained in the public consciousness. Nothing less is required to reduce the threat of loss of life in the event of the kind of natural disaster that the ODPM was formed to manage.