NEMO and Its Partners Fine Tune Hurricane Preparedness Plans

Tanya Santos

We are sixteen days into the Atlantic Hurricane Season and NEMO and its partners continue their disaster preparedness. Since the Ministry of Human Development forms the disaster relief committee, they held a planning meeting with NEMO. Here’s more from C.E.O. Tanya Santos and NEMO’s National Coordinator Shelton Defour:

Tanya Santos, C.E.O., Ministry of Human Development

“In preparing for the hurricane season, we are the ministry that is responsible for providing supplies right before, during and after a disaster, after an event. So, we want to make sure that our people are ready from Corozal to Toledo. Bear in mind that in addition to emergency duties, as a part of NEMO, this ministry is also responsible for all of the social protection and social work in the communities. So, we have to find a way to strike a balance in responding to these emergencies and keeping with our core duties.”

Shelton Defour

Shelton Defour, National Coordinator, NEMO

“NEMO provides oversight to the national committees so our job is to coordinate and integrate our work plan to ensure that the objectives that we are targeting in terms of readiness so that each committee reaches to a particular level of preparedness that once we have to go into action we know that we have a group of persons who would be on the ground representing these committees taking a action that would bring goods and services in times of disaster.  The meeting was to fine tune the national readiness for the relief and supplies committee to ensure that the key issues were identified and some solutions were established so that as we move forward into the Hurricane Season we become better at what we do in terms of being ready to provide service to the people of Belize.”

According to the Belize Met Service, the 2021 hurricane season is predicted to have above average hurricane activity.