Hurricane shelters island-wide to be decommissioned soon
Ainsworth Morris / Our Today
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Three weeks following the passage of Hurricane Melissa, Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness has indicated that emergency shelters will soon be decommissioned and demobilised.
“That creates some challenges, but why do we have to do this? Many, if not all, of the shelters now are schools. And, we have to get our schools back up for January,” Dr Holness said in his reasoning during the special press briefing on Hurricane Melissa, which was held at Jamaica House on Wednesday (November 19).
“The public should know that we have started a process to humanely, with the greatest consideration, decommission the shelters and find alternatives,” he said.
Holness disclosed that social workers and assessors from the Ministry of Labour and Social Security have already been deployed to do shelter assessments of the approximately 1,200 persons who are still in shelters island-wide.
“On a case-by-case basis, [social workers will] assess their needs and make recommendations or, where possible, implement solutions for the decanting of persons from these shelters, and that is underway,” Dr Holness said.
“Our hopeful target is that we could decommission 90 per cent of the occupants of the shelters from the shelters into alternatives. We are hopeful that we can do this. We are working very hard, but I can’t stand here and give a definitive date that it will happen,” he said.
With numerous shelters proven not to be safe spaces during the passage of Hurricane Melissa, he said, for future catastrophic events, more work will be done for the preparation of shelters in the country.
“There is no question in my mind that more work needs to be done on the selection of shelters. And, indeed, we may very well have to consider building shelters that are for that purpose or when we are building community facilities, to build them up to standards that a shelter would require,” Holness explained.
“Because in this disaster, many of the shelters that were prescribed as shelters were destroyed,” he added.
He also noted that now, areas that were not designated to be shelters are being used as shelters, given the extensive damage done to them during the storm.
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