Sandy’s Cautions

Oct 31, 2012 Editorial

Hurricane Sandy should serve as a wake-up call for us in Guyana. Natural disasters abound across the globe – earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanoes, tsunamis, etc. and we in Guyana used to take pride about this a bit. We ignore the fact that the vast majority of our population are living in a man-made bowl on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean, with the seawall in the north and conservancy dams in the south. Any threats to those man-made barriers would subject large numbers of our population to inundation either from the ocean or the conservancy. And was the case as late as 2005.
Those threats can arise from a variety of sources: a breach in our dilapidated seawall, a breach in the conservancy dams or excessive rainfall, as occurred in January. Then there are the man-made disasters such as the Omai spill.
When the rains came in December 2004, leading to the great flood of 2005, President Jagdeo could not even find the then head of the CDC – Dr. Luncheon.
We now know that absolutely nothing had been done to get Guyana in any shape to deal with the major identified disaster that could befall us.
Rather than continuing to look backwards, however, the different responses to the destruction wrought by Sandy in the Caribbean versus that in the US cautions us that we cannot hope to muddle through another flood. We were comparatively lucky in 2005 – even though we endured untold suffering, lost thirty-five lives, and $100 billion in property and goods.
There has to be a plan and we have to all trained in our roles to execute the plan.
In the Caribbean some 69 lives – 51 from Haiti alone – were lost after Sandy swept through our islands. There was more than US$4 billion in damage – mostly in Cuba and Haiti, two islands that can least afford such a reconstruction drive.
In contrast, the US suffered less loss of lives and proportionately smaller economic damage – primarily because it had disaster preparedness plans in place. Excepting for Cuba, it became painfully obvious that our Caribbean islands, especially Haiti and Jamaica were unprepared.
For us in Guyana, the question is, “What is the state of the disaster preparedness plan that was hopefully tweaked after 2005?” Has it been updated to take into account our expansion into the interior, for instance? And potential disasters will not arise only from natural phenomena.
There are several international companies drilling for oil off our coast. Apart from talking about preventing a Gulf-scale disaster, do we have actual contingency plans in place for such an eventuality?
The last well had to be abandoned and capped more than three miles under the sea because of excess pressure.
Any plan would have short, medium and long term components. We have heard much of the emergency work that has been done, say, on our drainage facilities and the conservancy dams since 2005.
The December rains should give us an indication of how effective these efforts were. What is the state of our evacuation option?
Sandy cautions that if the people are not drilled in evacuation exercises, the actual event will be disastrous. Compare the orderly evacuations on the US Eastern Seaboard with the confusion in the Kingston, Jamaica shantytowns last week.
Sandy cautions us that if we only prepare for the minimum disaster scenario, we may be setting ourselves up for a fall, or in our case, a flood. In the medium term, what are our plans as far as the height of our dams? In the long term, we know that global warming will cause the Atlantic to rise appreciably.
What are our plans in relation to our sea walls which were built to deal with only a four-foot-below-sea-level coastline? If that option is prohibitively expensive, does it change our views on relocation into our interior? These are only some of the cautions of Sandy.

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