Hurricane Melissa exposed weaknesses in Jamaica's disaster preparedness framework - PM

 

Prime Minister Dr. Andrew Holness has acknowledged that Hurricane Melissa exposed critical weaknesses in Jamaica's disaster preparedness framework, with the government identifying seven major lessons from the deadly weather system. 

 

Dr. Holness made the acknowledgement at Wednesday's launch of the National Risk Disaster Council meeting. 

 

It said Jamaica must never adopt the view that their survival depends on waiting for rescue, but instead plan, prepare, organise, respond, and recover as an independent country, while using partnerships to strengthen national action. 

 

Before outlining the lessons, Prime Minister Holness disclosed that the government will soon announce further investments in the logistics, transport, and operational capabilities of the Jamaica Defence Force. 

 

The Prime Minister said the first lesson was leadership, noting that the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management (ODPEM) must evolve into Jamaica's national resilience organisation. 

 

"There has to be a mechanism, predetermined, in place, so when people come to partner, it is a simple plug and play. But that means our leadership must be present. We must be there to meet them at our ports when they come to assist. ODPEM, by law, must be a national bastion of leadership in crisis," he argued.

 

Dr. Holness said the second lesson learned from the storm is that logistics is central, noting that Melissa demonstrated that national response is fundamentally a logistics operation. 

 

Turning to the third and fourth lessons, Dr. Holness said information is a life-saving asset, warning that the state is partially blind if it does not know which roads are blocked, which shelters are operating and where electricity and water services are down. 

 

He also argued that Jamaica cannot continue to operate as an informal society because informality hampers recovery and reconstruction efforts. 

 

"Some communities are informal, scattered, poorly mapped, or not fully captured in our database. Those communities were not served or got service later on in the respond. This mentality that you can go and build anywhere, live anywhere, and somehow the state must know that you are there, when you don't want the state to know that you are there, then you say, 'You didn't come to me,'. Well, we didn't know you were there because it's not documented," he suggested.

 

Outlining the remaining lessons, Dr. Holness said government institutions must be resilient before disaster strikes. He said fiscal resilience matters, noting that the government's layered funding strategy allowed for an immediate response to Melissa. 

 

But he warned that if households are not prepared and evacuation plans are not tested, national readiness remains incomplete.