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Work begins on risk reduction strategy for The Bahamas

FREEPORT, Grand Bahama – Officials of the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and Environmental Solutions met with disaster managers and private and public sector partners in Grand Bahama recently to develop a draft, Natural Risk Reduction Program for The Bahamas.

Carl F. Smith, Under Secretary to the Cabinet and interim Director of NEMA, said the project will focus on areas that are of “critical importance to The Bahamas.” These include communications, sheltering and community preparedness, the institutional strengthening of the legal framework of NEMA and the risk profiling of the entire Bahamas.

He said officials at the National Emergency Management Agency chose Grand Bahama as the site for the discussions because they wanted the consultants to get a first hand view of the areas of Grand Bahama that were affected by Hurricanes Frances, Jeanne and Wilma.

“We thought to come to Grand Bahama because this island is a composite of all of the islands in that it has a Family Island flavor in the West End area, a city area in Freeport and more importantly, the persons here have recently experienced a succession of hurricanes,” Mr. Smith said.

Under Secretary Smith said the Project will be designed to include all natural hazards that could impact The Bahamas.

He said that in the past, the focus of the Emergency Managers has been on responding, but that the focus has now changed to prevention, mitigation and risk management.

“And so in designing the Project, a lot of emphasis will be placed on prevention and mitigation and of course harnessing and improving upon our response capabilities,” Mr. Smith said, “and that’s why we will have the Risk Management and Vulnerability issues in there.”

Eleanor Jones, lead consultant for the Project, said the group – in collaboration with the private and public sector – will design a program that “is going to make a difference to the way The Bahamas handles its own risk and its exposure.”

The company has been charged with designing the approach and terms of reference for the study that is to be undertaken.

“In handling risk we are looking not only at how effectively we can respond to an event that is an extraordinary event, but also how we can reduce our losses, be they loss of life or loss of property and reduce the kind of dislocation that comes with these events,” Ms. Jones said.
She said that while nothing can be done to prevent natural occurrences of events such as hurricanes, quite a bit can be done about “how we interface” with these events.

Ms. Jones said an inspection of the areas damaged by Hurricane Wilma in 2005 provided the team with tremendous insight into the geography of The Bahamas and how the country needs to proceed in the future in terms of further development.

“We are charged with the task of looking at the Risk Profile; what are the natural hazards that affect which islands and how; what is the vulnerability – which means how exposed are the islands in terms of economic activity, in terms of livelihoods, in terms of housing and how exposed are these ingredients of the society to these hazards and then, putting them all together – the exposure, the vulnerability and the hazard – we come up with a dollar value as to what may be the probable losses given the interface between the hazard and the vulnerability,” Ms. Jones said.

Ms. Jones said communities will play a very important role in the process. She said that at a world summit on disaster reduction held in Japan in 2005, one of the key themes coming out of that summit was building community resilience.

“They looked at how to help communities cope with events and very importantly, how to help them get back up and running as quickly as possible. That can take many forms including some of the aforementioned issues and that is particularly important because of the geography of The Bahamas which is an archipelagic state, boasting so many islands that separated by water.”

Ms. Jones said the composition of The Bahamas’ calls for a system where “each island has a certain level of capability” which she says will give the persons on those islands the resilience to reduce suffering and loss.

“You cannot have a centralized system. You must have a system where each island has a certain level of capability which gives them that resilience to reduce suffering and loss,” Ms. Jones added.

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