Carisa Lee

Re­porter

carisa.lee@cnc3.co.tt 

The T&T Gov­ern­ment, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the pri­vate sec­tor, packed a third ves­sel, the Galleon’s Pas­sage, filled with re­lief sup­plies set for Grena­da on Fri­day.

In a press re­lease, the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­istry said that through its agen­cies, the Of­fice of Dis­as­ter Pre­pared­ness and Man­age­ment (ODPM) and the T&T De­fence Force (TTDF) had been work­ing with the Min­istry of Trade and In­dus­try to trans­port goods to Grena­da, and St Vin­cent and the Grenadines as they cope in the af­ter­math of Hur­ri­cane Beryl.

Ac­cord­ing to the ODPM, the Air Guard of the TTDF trans­port­ed their op­er­a­tions man­ag­er and re­gion­al co­or­di­na­tor, along with a rep­re­sen­ta­tive from the Wa­ter and Sewage Au­thor­i­ty (WASA), to Grena­da to as­sist that coun­try in re­cov­er­ing from the dis­as­ter.

CAF do­nates US$.8M

Mean­while, the CAF-De­vel­op­ment Bank of Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean do­nat­ed US$800,000 to the coun­tries im­pact­ed by Hur­ri­cane Beryl. CAF’s ex­ec­u­tive pres­i­dent, Ser­gio Díaz-Grana­dos, ex­pressed the in­sti­tu­tion’s sol­i­dar­i­ty with those af­fect­ed by the dev­as­tat­ing im­pact of Hur­ri­cane Beryl and an­nounced the im­me­di­ate de­liv­ery of do­na­tions in­tend­ed for hu­man­i­tar­i­an aid and emer­gency as­sis­tance to af­fect­ed com­mu­ni­ties.

Ex­ist­ing share­hold­er coun­tries of CAF, Ja­maica and Bar­ba­dos, re­ceived US$250,000, while Grena­da, St Vin­cent and the Grenadines, and St Lu­cia re­ceived US$100,000 each.

“We recog­nise the swift ac­tions tak­en by those gov­ern­ments to sup­port the com­mu­ni­ties that felt the full brunt of Hur­ri­cane Beryl, and we com­mend the cit­i­zens for their re­silience in the face of ad­ver­si­ty. We be­lieve that by work­ing to­geth­er, CAF can help to bol­ster the re­cov­ery ef­forts of the gov­ern­ments and their re­spec­tive pop­u­la­tions,” stat­ed Díaz-Grana­dos.

In a state­ment, CAF re­it­er­at­ed the im­por­tance of el­e­vat­ing glob­al aware­ness about the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty to cli­mate change in the Caribbean. It said it was time to take de­ci­sive ac­tion to tack­le its ef­fects, with an em­pha­sis on poli­cies and in­vest­ments in cli­mate change adap­ta­tion as well as risk man­age­ment tools. Unit­ed Na­tions (UN) Res­i­dent Co-or­di­na­tor for Ja­maica Den­nis Zu­lu said over 40 per cent of the elec­tric­i­ty had been out since the pas­sage of Beryl, as well as sev­er­al hous­es de­stroyed.

He said that through the UN Cen­tral Emer­gency Re­sponse Fund, $2.5 mil­lion was made avail­able to ren­der aid in Ja­maica.

“Of course, some of the peo­ple who have been af­fect­ed would have lost liveli­hoods, so we are look­ing to sup­port them in terms of cash trans­fers. Def­i­nite­ly,  shel­ter is one thing we are look­ing at be­cause some of the build­ings and hous­ing have been de­stroyed, en­sur­ing the pro­vi­sion of clean drink­ing wa­ter, but we are al­so look­ing at the po­ten­tial for sup­port in terms of get­ting ac­cess to com­mu­ni­ca­tion and da­ta,” Zu­lu ex­plained.