Emily misses San Pedro, but threat was real

For a while she had Belizeans in a state of serious agitation… but fortunately the track of Hurricane Emily did not deviate from the path chartered by meteorologists and missed us by a good several hundred miles. The risk was real, however, and nowhere as threatening as in San Pedro and the whole of Ambergris Caye. This afternoon News Five’s Stewart Krohn asked NEMO’s man on the island, Jim Janmohamed, to post-mortem the very close call.

Jim Janmohamed, NEMO District Coordinator
?The reason NEMO and the Met Office advised was that this storm was moving quite rapidly and further to that, when we met earlier with Minister Godfrey Smith and other members of the team, we had mentioned that San Pedro needs to think about if it?s going to disperse people from the island, to think about it quite fast because the window of opportunity is always very narrow here. Because once the water starts to get rough and the air turbulence, and also remember that domestic airlines have to be sent away to be tied down in case we are going to be hit by tropical storm force winds or hurricane winds. So we decided that we would advise the public to disperse if they thought their homes could not handle hurricane winds, to disperse to the mainland.?

?By domestic airlines we transported one thousand, seven hundred and sixty-five people. This is Maya Island Air and Tropic Air. And by sea, by water taxis we dispersed seven thousand, two hundred people. The total confirmed people transported to the mainland were eight thousand, nine hundred and sixty-five. These figures, they do not account for people who departed on private vessels or charters. The amount of people estimated to have stayed on the island, and this is a guess estimate, is two thousand.

As of this morning, most of those evacuated were beginning to return to the island.

Jim Janmohamed
?We went into phase green this morning at six o?clock this morning, so the people started to move down to Belize City from wherever various locations they were in and started to get on the boats and the planes, so they are still coming on to the island. That is why we haven?t deactivated the team yet, the San Pedro Emergency Committee, because just in case, when you have that many assets in the water and you have an accident, you want to be ready.?

Stewart Krohn
?We heard rumours for example, that when people started evacuating, the authorities became a little concerned because it became conspicuous that a lot of the people not evacuating were people who were kinda on your bad guys list of suspected thieves and things like that. Did that cause any concern, and if so, what did you do to respond??

Jim Janmohamed
?We had some arrests made during the night after the evacuation, or after the dispersal of people in that we had a lot of patrols by police and B.D.F., so they picked up various people for disorderly conduct, drunkenness, and just plain loitering with intent to do something wrong. So they were arrested and held in the police station and then released later on.?

Stewart Krohn
?What lesson has been learned from this close call in San Pedro??

Jim Janmohamed
?The things that we learnt were that a lot of people were thinking that maybe we decided to take this action too quick, and disperse people too early. But when you think we move nine thousand odd people, and the window of opportunity, if we would have procrastinated on this and if that storm would have changed direction, we would have been in a hell of a lot of trouble, we would have deaths for sure.?

Janmohamed noted that the police and B.D.F. worked well with each other and with local authorities. San Pedranos were praised for the responsible and orderly way in which the evacuation was handled.

And in related news, amidst all the tension of the approaching storm, San Pedro police managed to solve a major crime. It seems that sometime between Thursday night and Friday morning an iron safe holding cash and documents belonging to the Town Council was stolen from the Town Hall. By late Sunday evening, however, while the hurricane was still knocking at the door, police arrested five San Pedranos for the heist. They are twenty year old Alexander Edwards, eighteen year old Andres Arana, nineteen year old Gabriel Salazar, nineteen year old William Nunez, and a sixteen year old. The safe and documents have been recovered, but not the cash.