At Least Eighty Schools Suffered Damages Caused by Hurricane Lisa

Francis Fonseca

Hurricane Lisa left many Belize City residents in distress and while some people have been able to recover from their losses, a lot are still taking it a day at a time. But some schools were also damaged in the strong category one hurricane. Today, Minister of Education, Francis Fonseca revealed that at least eighty schools suffered some kind of damage caused by the hurricane and that number is bound to increase as the assessments continue.  The final cost is yet to be determined.

Francis Fonseca, Minister of Education

“We hit the ground right away, right after the hurricane all-clear was given. We work very closely with the Ministry of Infrastructure Development in carrying out a full assessment of our school properties across the country. If course we got a lot of help from managements and the teachers and principals on the ground, so there were many, many schools. I think our initial assessment showed that there were probably around eighty schools, but that’s still ongoing so that figure will go up – about eighty schools that were damaged. We had different levels of damage. We had very severe damage, medium damage, and then we had very minor damage where a window was broken here and there or that sort of thing. So all of that assessment has been put together along with the full NEMO report and that will form a part of the government’s efforts to raise funds to assist with the recovery efforts. You know, we have to be patient and where we can, we’ve been trying to work with schools to address basic infrastructure needs, to address in the short-term, but in terms of long-term structural damage, we will have to wait until those monies are available and then we will try to assist.”