To­day, Trinidad and To­ba­go finds it­self of the cusp of a re­al lit­mus test for our nat­ur­al dis­as­ter re­sponse. If the fore­casts by the Na­tion­al Hur­ri­cane Cen­tre and T&T Me­te­o­ro­log­i­cal Ser­vice held for overnight in­to to­day, cit­i­zens will al­ready be see­ing signs of what the bad weath­er as­so­ci­at­ed with the trop­i­cal storm ex­pect­ed to sweep over the coun­try will bring.

The re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tions were put on high alert since Sun­day by Rur­al De­vel­op­ment Min­is­ter Faris Al-Rawi and the Of­fice of Dis­as­ter Pre­pared­ness and Man­age­ment would have al­so trig­gered their re­sponse mech­a­nisms.

From all re­ports yes­ter­day, cit­i­zens were hap­py with the pre-storm prepa­ra­tions by the re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tions, who dis­trib­uted thou­sands of sand­bags to those de­sirous of shoring up their prop­er­ties in low-ly­ing flood-prone com­mu­ni­ties. Cor­po­ra­tions have al­so in­di­cat­ed that their staff and ma­chin­ery stand mo­bilised and ready to roll in­to pos­si­ble ac­tion.

For all of the ap­par­ent plan­ning and de­ci­sions un­der­tak­en by Cab­i­net since last week, how­ev­er, there do ap­pear to be some chinks in the ar­mour go­ing in.

For starters, some re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tions were over­whelmed by the re­sponse for sand­bags and ran out of sup­ply. Luck­i­ly, some cor­po­rate cit­i­zen picked up the slack.

The late an­nounce­ment on Mon­day night by the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion to close all ear­ly child­hood cen­tres and pri­ma­ry schools and al­low­ing on­ly stu­dents and staff in­volved in the CAPE ex­ams al­so did no favours to par­ents/guardians re­spon­si­ble for the care of those chil­dren. As a re­sult of this, many par­ent/guardians were still in the dark yes­ter­day morn­ing and left scam­per­ing to make al­ter­na­tive arrange­ments for their chil­dren.

And this, of course, leads to the even more be­lat­ed de­ci­sion to dis­miss pub­lic ser­vants from work at lunchtime yes­ter­day. By now, Cab­i­net should sure­ly know there is a cor­re­lat­ing ac­tion which would have come with the an­nounce­ment of no school for the ma­jor­i­ty of the stu­dent pop­u­la­tion. This is to say that pub­lic ser­vants, the Gov­ern­ment be­ing a ma­jor em­ploy­er in the coun­try, would have been faced with find­ing per­sons to care for their chil­dren or, ul­ti­mate­ly, stay­ing home to do so them­selves.

Giv­en the sit­u­a­tion, the more prag­mat­ic de­ci­sion by the Gov­ern­ment should have been to shut down both schools and gov­ern­ment of­fices yes­ter­day in the first in­stance and save the con­fu­sion of pub­lic ser­vants rush­ing out of the cap­i­tal all at the same time yes­ter­day.

Hav­ing said that, the main re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for the pro­tec­tion of the lives, liveli­hood and prop­er­ty will fall on the pub­lic for the most part of the next 36 hours. Hope­ful­ly, cit­i­zens would have tak­en coun­ter­mea­sures ahead of the storm, in­clud­ing shoring up roofs and re­mov­ing de­bris which could pose risks on their prop­er­ties. Of course, there was the last-minute pan­ic buy­ing by some yes­ter­day de­spite the fact that the warn­ing had come since the week­end.

Need­less to say, we hope that all cit­i­zens have equipped them­selves with all that is nec­es­sary to stay in place for any­thing over the next two days. This will al­so be a pe­ri­od to be your broth­er’s keep­er and we hope those who are in bet­ter po­si­tions will come for­ward to pro­vide for oth­ers should it come to this.

Above all, stay safe T&T.