$3 Million in Damages to Schools by Hurricane Lisa

Dian Maheia

It’s been a little over five weeks since Hurricane Lisa battered central Belize. The category one storm damaged a lot of schools, ripping off roofs and exposing the deplorable conditions in which some school buildings were. In an interview with the Chief Executive Officer in the Ministry of Education, we asked for an update on those seventy-seven schools and getting the institutions back to normal.

Dian Maheia, C.E.O., Ministry of Education

“We have seventy-seven schools across the country that reported damage from Hurricane Lisa, different degrees of damage. The general estimate for those damages, the financial estimate was some three million dollars in total. In some school what we saw was immediate community support. We saw people working together. The bulk of what needed to be done was cleaning; we all know this, we lived through it. And so in a lot of places, that general cleaning has taken place and so school is back in session. What we see are watermarks; we still see ceilings where there has been evidence of leakage, but the school hasn’t been able to restore, so we have that level of kind of return to normalcy. We have some situations like for example, Belize Rural Primary School where their roof was a complete loss. And we’ve done the estimates; we have to do a complete repair. And we have seen where the initial estimate in cost has tripled what we thought it would be to what it actually is going to cost. The ministry is doing its best to support where it can. We have seen already donations and support from different organizations, in some cases, financial support and in some cases material support. And so this week coming, because we are moving into the Christmas break, we are going to be doing some outreach to touch base again with the schools and find out where are you and what do you need.  Part of the reason the devastation was so significant is that we are looking at schools that had not been maintained; we are looking at school buildings that really had not been taken care of for a very long time and that’s why it was so devastating because in many cases, the buildings themselves were weak and hadn’t been restored. So now that they are being fixed, the goal is to make sure that they can be properly fixed so that again, if I use the Belize Rural Primary School as an example, when that roof has been repaired, that’s going to be a hurricane shelter to withstand any future disasters along the lines of Hurricane Lisa.”