Two days af­ter Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley said $25 mil­lion would be made avail­able to help flood vic­tims, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert an­nounced that Gov­ern­ment was now seek­ing to get ad­di­tion­al funds from the Caribbean Cat­a­stro­phe Risk In­sur­ance Fa­cil­i­ty (CCRIF).

In a tweet yes­ter­day, Im­bert wrote, “MoF has re­quest­ed the Caribbean Cat­a­stro­phe Risk In­sur­ance Fa­cil­i­ty (CCRIF) to ur­gent­ly dis­burse funds un­der our cat­a­stro­phe in­sur­ance pol­i­cy. CCRIF usu­al­ly deals on­ly with hur­ri­cane re­lief, but two years ago the MoF paid for ad­di­tion­al cov­er­age for dam­age from ex­ces­sive rain­fall.”

It is un­cer­tain how much the cov­er­age will be, but pay­ments are usu­al­ly made with­in 14 days of ap­pli­ca­tion.

Last year, fol­low­ing two days of heavy rains in Oc­to­ber, the CCRIF SPC (for­mer­ly the Caribbean Cat­a­stro­phe Risk In­sur­ance Fa­cil­i­ty) paid US$7,007,886 (ap­prox­i­mate­ly TT$47.4 mil­lion) on its Ex­cess Rain­fall pol­i­cy.

T&T has been a mem­ber of CCRIF since 2007 and has pur­chased CCRIF poli­cies for trop­i­cal cy­clone and earth­quakes since 2007.

On its web­site, the CCRIF said in 2017 the Gov­ern­ment pur­chased a CCRIF pol­i­cy for Ex­cess Rain­fall (XSR) and has two sep­a­rate XSR poli­cies in place—one for Trinidad and one for To­ba­go.

The CCRIF SPC is a seg­re­gat­ed port­fo­lio com­pa­ny, owned, op­er­at­ed and reg­is­tered in the Caribbean. It lim­its the fi­nan­cial im­pact of cat­a­stroph­ic hur­ri­canes, earth­quakes and ex­cess rain­fall events to the Caribbean and—since 2015 Cen­tral Amer­i­can gov­ern­ments—by quick­ly pro­vid­ing short-term liq­uid­i­ty when a para­met­ric in­sur­ance pol­i­cy is trig­gered.

On Sun­day, Cou­va North MP Ra­mona Ram­di­al had called on Row­ley to es­tab­lish a Na­tion­al Dis­as­ter Re­lief Fund, say­ing the $25 mil­lion al­lo­cat­ed by Cab­i­net was “woe­ful­ly in­ad­e­quate” to com­pen­sate thou­sands of flood vic­tims who lost every­thing.

She said the Min­istry of So­cial Wel­fare still owes flood vic­tims com­pen­sa­tion cheques for the years 2016 and 2017, adding that “tens of thou­sands of cit­i­zens lost their ve­hi­cles, ap­pli­ances, gro­ceries, clothes, school books and in some cas­es their en­tire hous­es.”

Ram­di­al called on Row­ley to in­crease the “Flood Re­lief Fund to an ini­tial $100 mil­lion to be prop­er­ly man­aged and dis­trib­uted by the Min­istry of Fi­nance.”