It is with fright­en­ing speed that nat­ur­al dis­as­ters are oc­cur­ring: tor­ren­tial down­pours which cause land­slides and flood­ing, earth­quakes, tsunamis, hur­ri­canes and "freak storms" where high winds rip rooftops from homes and down trees across roads, etc. Added to this are hor­rif­ic acts of ter­ror­ism world­wide and Trinida­di­ans will re­call the bomb­ings a few years ago in Port-of-Spain, and re­cent­ly the dis­cov­ery of ex­plo­sives in Ari­ma which leaves me won­der­ing what next?

Colm Im­bert, then works min­is­ter un­der the PNM gov­ern­ment, had stat­ed that they would have ini­ti­at­ed an evac­u­a­tion plan for Port-of-Spain. This is long over­due and I am call­ing on the rel­e­vant min­istries to please act now be­fore an­oth­er dis­as­ter (nat­ur­al or man-made) oc­curs.

I have been work­ing in Port-of-Spain for more than 20 years and have yet to see a gov­ern­ment im­ple­ment an ef­fec­tive evac­u­a­tion plan. A slight earth­quake caus­es the build­ing in which I work to sway and peo­ple chaot­i­cal­ly scam­per­ing to evac­u­ate. Imag­ing this on a big­ger scale!

What would hap­pen, for ex­am­ple, if the hills sur­round­ing the city hap­pen to come crash­ing down, as in Venezuela some years ago, where tor­ren­tial down­pour caused land­slides in the moun­tains where hun­dreds of squat­ters lived and which land­slides en­gulfed a town with mud, wa­ter and de­bris more than 20 feet in some places? Thou­sands died!

In Port-of-Spain we have in the north, the moun­tains, and in the south, the sea and I shud­der to think of a dis­as­ter, nat­ur­al or oth­er­wise oc­cur­ring with no evac­u­a­tion plan in ef­fect. This should be a pri­or­i­ty for any gov­ern­ment and I hope that the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship gov­ern­ment con­tin­ue to be for the peo­ple and im­ple­ment such a plan.

S Ram­dath

Freeport