Minister defends actions of NEMO

Among the complaints flooding the airwaves since Monday is that residents in the affected areas were not given enough warning for them to get out of harm’s way. This afternoon those in the hot seat responded to the criticisms.

Prime Minister Dean Barrow
“I know that questions have arisen about whether or not we ought to have anticipated the scale of what took place and in the Stann Creek District and if so why we didn’t in fact anticipate it. Mr. Frutos has explained to me that this was really a kind of freak occurrence that with the best will in the world and with all the resources in the world, we could not have anticipated.”

Ramon Frutos, Acting Chief Meteorologist
“This system is a system that cannot be easily predicted. We were expecting this to continue moving westwards as all the echoes were doing but in the actual fact that remained right there and just mushroomed, continued to regenerate itself. There is no forecaster, no hurricane centre throughout the world that can forecast what was going to happen in a situation like this because it just blow up in your face.”

Melvin Hulse, Minister Responsible for NEMO
“Tragedy happens, nobody wants it, I don’t want it of my friends. But the fact is that these technical which none ah we dah experts on except Ramon, when you have a system, one sitting out there bringing rain and wah next one and everything, the two ah dehn get together and dehn use what the fancy term “mushroom” and all of a sudden … nobody can predict that okay, none. And the thing is that what are we gonna? Ten o’clock at night we fi seh bwai yoh know we think that this might really cause problem and you go tell people who is on dry land you better evacuate because ih wah do it. Dehn no wah believe yoh so noh fool yoh self. And you have no justification to activate NEMO so let’s get things in the right prospective okay. When there’s bad weather out there we get activated and when we are activated we work. So let’s move away from that.”