Disaster Risk Management Consultant, Cecil Shillingford, has revealed that plans are in place to implement the enhancement of early warning systems to provide information to the general public before, during and immediately after a disaster.
He made that announcement while addressing a press conference on Friday.
“A lot of these early warning systems, weather, seismic and other, the way it is right now they go to the media, then the media informs the general public,” he said. “We are going to put in place something a little more advanced than that, once this information reaches the Office of Disaster Management [ODM] or the MET Office that we can provide it to the general public, almost in real time.”
Shillingford continued, “As you realize that in the recent past, in the last 5 years we’ve been seeing quite a few rain events, very significant rain events and there is a project under the DVRP World Bank that will provide some stream gauges and other weather related early warning systems, that will be put in place.”
He stated further that the information will be made available to the public on smartphones, tablets and other devices persons may carry.
“It will become an alert system,” Shillingford noted.
He made it clear that the media will still be used to distribute information.
“The media has been a source for many years, but we are just trying to bring it to the general public in a quicker form,” he explained.
Meantime, he mentioned that one of the matters that his department will be looking at is the finalization of the disaster legislation.
“Disaster legislation has been brought up to a point where it is almost ready to go before Parliament,” he revealed.
However, he stated that given situations during Tropical Storm Erika, “we decided that there are some matters within the legislation which would need some tweaking, especially matters dealing with relief, when you have a big event like that, and also matters of evacuation which the legislation is sort of silence on, so that needs to be incorporated.”
Shillingford also touched on a couple of accomplishments for 2016, one being the new staffing at the ODM.
“We received mentoring and guidance from [yours truly] and I think they are working out quite well, and before too long I would hope that we would see some appointments there,” he noted. “We are also looking at creating some new positions, so as to increase the workload that is required in disaster risk management work around the island, especially in the communities.”
“We need to focus more attention directly into the communities,’ Shillingford added.
He said the other accomplishment was the review of the National Emergency Planning Organization (NEPO) and its various organs.
“We are making recommendations to the ministry and to cabinet and we hope those will be accepted so that we can update the national plan which hasn’t been done for a little while, and a lot of these changes can be factored into the new plan,” he explained.
Bravo Cecil!! Way to go!!You were so clamoring for the position and now its finally here! Hope you will not criticize again. Is everything all right now , because once when you were on the opposing side everything was wrong whether it was for the development of the country or not. Should we trust you now? Are you doing it now for love of country?
You know it is very difficult to understand what Shillingford is talking about. He speaks of warning system, and plugged in seismic and other. When people are talking about seismic they are simple talking about something which caused an earthquake, or something relating to an earth vibration, anything such as an explosion or the impact of a meteorite; or relating to a vibration on a celestial body.
Hence, it seems to me he is referencing to some sort of seismometer, or shall I say a seismograph used in the measuring of the actual movement of the ground. That measurement is after the fact, after the movement, so I do count that as a warning system.
Now, weather stations track storms by Radar, and in the United States there Aircrafts out there constantly monitoring the weather. Nevertheless, they do not stop tornados from destroying entire communities, without warning. In Dominica, heavy rain fall caused soil erosion, and landslide, so one wonders how he is going to warn against…
So, one wonders if he is going to have some kind of supernatural instrument or extraterrestrials, which will detect where the soil will become saturated by falling rain, that will cause soil erosion which will trigger landslide.
Hence he will commence disseminating disaster warning on cell phone to everybody in Dominica, even to the ones with invisible Smart phone.
Why don’t you people make sense. I live in Los Angeles, where there is an earthquake each and every day of the year; of which 99% are so slight they can only be detected, and measured on the Richter Scale. If there is an tremor in Dominica, during the event it is monitored right here thousands of miles; between seven or ten thousand miles from Dominica, but they do not have any mechanical instrument as of yet which detects earthquakes before they occur.
Many of Dominica’s current spate of catastrophes related to rainfall are caused, not so much by the weather but by poor land management. In particular, this applies to farming practice and road construction. The devastation at Petite Savane and the problems at Antrim (and by extension Check Hall) are cases in point.
You cannot have proper Land Management in a country which cannot consistently enforce the law. All one needs to do to get around the already lax land use policies in Dominica is either to speak to their parl rep and/or pay one of the officers at the Physical Planning Division to draw the plan for them.