San Pedro prepares for evacuation
When the Coast Guard boats arrive at San Pedro tomorrow they will be visiting the community that is the most susceptible to hurricanes in all of Belize. The reason? That same close-in reef and proximity to deep blue water that make Ambergris Caye such a paradise for divers and fishermen also makes it extremely vulnerable to waves and storm surge. Even a hurricane whose winds never touch the island—like Mitch in 1998—can damage or destroy almost every pier on the caye. This afternoon News Five’s Stewart Krohn spoke to the NEMO Coordinator for San Pedro and Caye Caulker, Jim Janmohamed.
James Janmohamed, NEMO Coordinator for San Pedro and Caye Caulker
“Stewart, you now realize that this is still not hit our preliminary phase line, but however, with living on an island, because of the narrow opportunity of evacuation, we have already started our meetings with both islands with their emergency committees, San Pedro Emergency Committee and Caye Caulker Emergency Committee. We have both been on radio to inform our, both the island residents that the storm of course, is approaching, and to start getting their plans in motion and getting out, and start revising them and to see that what they’re gonna do and how they gonna do it. The decisions for evacuations will probably be made late Saturday. We are in process, at the moment, of sending advisory to all the hotels, what to tell their tourists. This morning, we realized that some of the tourists in St. Lucia had been stranded because they made a decision to move themselves a little too late, and they were no aircrafts flying in, so they got stranded. And Jamaica has already started to empty it’s tourists out, so I think by tomorrow morning, or late tomorrow afternoon, we will decide to evacuate our tourists first and maybe that might happen as early as tomorrow afternoon or as late as Sunday morning.”
Stewart Krohn
“In the town itself, are people starting to board up windows, and otherwise prepare themselves?”
James Janmohamed
“Yea, as you drive through there’re certain people are boarding up, certain hotels have already taken it upon themselves to remove the tourists and release their staff. However, we haven’t given that notice of evacuation to anybody at the moment. It would be rather too early.”
Stewart Krohn
“Jim, when the time comes—if the time comes—where you have to do a mass evacuation of the island, do you have the air capacity and boat capacity to get everyone who want to go, off the island?”
James Janmohamed
“Yes, Stewart, once we tell them that they have to evacuate, we have ample time for evacuation and the aircraft, and the boats will be able to bring them out. However, the only problem we always face is with procrastinators, once they decide to procrastinate and not come out on time, then of course, we get into trouble. But if the people start to move when we tell them to, I believe we have the capacity to move them out.”
Stewart Krohn
“By the way, where do you move them to?”
James Janmohamed
“We’ve tried various evacuation points and the only one that seems to work the best is Belize City, the reason being that lot of the people have family and friends who pick them up and take them wherever they going. They feel more comfortable to be in a city where there is a bus transportation to various directions of the country. And lot of the people that evacuate from San Pedro of course are not indigenous to San Pedro, but are from Cayo, Corozal, Orange Walk, Punta Gorda and Dangriga. ”
Those boats and planes, it must be remembered, must also find shelter for themselves once they complete their critical evacuation work.
