Rapheal John-Lall

T&T does not have any ma­jor emer­gency plan to deal with the af­ter­math of a ma­jor earth­quake said Gre­go­ry Aboud, Pres­i­dent of the Down­town Own­ers and Mer­chants As­so­ci­a­tion (DO­MA).

He re­ferred to Tues­day's earth­quake 6.1 tremor which hit T&T.

"It was a very sharp earth­quake but it was short in du­ra­tion and the coun­try es­caped from any ma­jor dam­age. But it does draw in­to ques­tion our ca­pa­bil­i­ty to deal with a ma­jor event. We do not at this time have a set­tled evac­u­a­tion plan in the event of a cat­a­stro­phe like an earth­quake. We on­ly have plans to deal with flood­ing and storms but we do not have an emer­gency evac­u­a­tion plan to cope with a ma­jor seis­mic event," he said.

Aboud spoke to the me­dia yes­ter­day at the launch of a cer­e­mo­ny to build a mul­ti-storey carpark, 15 Cha­con Street, Port-of-Spain. An earth­quake mag­ni­tude 6.2 hit T&T on Tues­day and there were sev­er­al oth­er af­ter­shocks lat­er on dur­ing the night. He said that T&T al­so does not have ma­jor res­cue ca­pa­bil­i­ties.

"Those per­sons who may be trapped in rub­ble or de­bris have a win­dow of 50 or 60 hours to sur­vive be­fore they ex­pire. We need to be able to say that we have a res­cue ca­pa­bil­i­ty that could re­spond to dif­fer­ent ar­eas. Es­pe­cial­ly if the earth­quake were to hap­pen dur­ing work­ing hours which would find not on­ly peo­ple at work but chil­dren in schools. That is a sig­nif­i­cant is­sue for us to con­sid­er," he said.

He re­newed calls for the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty be put in charge of cre­at­ing a re­serve guard or re­serve mili­tia which was specif­i­cal­ly in­tend­ed to as­sist in the event of a search and res­cue fol­low­ing a ma­jor earth­quake.

"I have sat on more than one dis­as­ter com­mit­tee and more than one evac­u­a­tion com­mit­tee and I re­new calls that we rein­vig­o­rate the quest to form an­oth­er com­mit­tee to try to an­swer this ques­tion of who would be the best per­son to put in charge of an evac­u­a­tion plan es­pe­cial­ly for the City of Port-of-Spain," he said.

Re­ply­ing to queries about a build­ing code to en­sure pro­tec­tion of cit­i­zens in the event of a mas­sive earth­quake, Prime Min­is­ter Kei­th Row­ley said a build­ing code had been around for decades and what should be of con­cern was whether it has been com­plied with and en­forced.

Speak­ing in Par­lia­ment, Row­ley added,"Be­cause of the high qual­i­ty of build­ing ma­te­ri­als, in T&T the over­all fin­ished prod­uct is usu­al­ly above min­i­mum stan­dards and where we're deal­ing with larg­er mul­ti-sto­ried build­ings we usu­al­ly build to the Cal­i­for­nia code, the high­est stan­dard in the world, bear­ing in mind, we're in a seis­mic re­ac­tive zone."

He said pro­ce­dures be­ing com­plet­ed on mi­cro­zona­tion work in Port-of Spain and San Fer­nan­do–and soon to start in To­ba­go–would put T&T in a bet­ter po­si­tion to re­spond to earth­quakes.

Seis­mic mi­cro­zona­tion is the process of sub­di­vid­ing a po­ten­tial seis­mic or earth­quake prone area in­to zones with re­spect to some ge­o­log­i­cal and geo­phys­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics of the sites (ground shak­ing, liq­ue­fac­tion sus­cep­ti­bil­i­ty, land­slide, rock fall haz­ard, earth­quake-re­lat­ed flood­ing, etc so that seis­mic haz­ards at dif­fer­ent lo­ca­tions with­in the area can cor­rect­ly be iden­ti­fied.

Row­e­ly ad­mit­ted he hadn't vis­it­ed dis­as­ter-hit ar­eas of Matelot and Grand Riv­iere. He, how­ev­er, de­tailed work done by the Works, Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment and oth­er agen­cies in­clud­ing De­fence Force.

He said there was con­tin­u­ous re­lief re­spons­es and if im­prove­ment was need­ed, this would be done. He said one MP for the area who had at­tend­ed a Bar­ba­dos con­fer­ence in­stead of vis­it­ing, had ex­plained why, and vis­it­ed the area yes­ter­day.

–with re­port­ing by Gail Alexan­der

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