National Security Minister Rayburn Blackmoore said that Dominica’s capacity in terms of shelter has improved significantly as compared to last year.
“Our capacity in terms of our shelter and capacity has significantly improved, because of the regional shelters that we have built and the housing program that we have embarked on over the years,” he said. “We have a capacity of 7,960 as opposed to 3,570 people requiring shelters.”
According to him, the government has been able to decentralize its storage capacity by building storage centres and emergency centres in Castle Bruce, and Cotton Hill, amongst others.
“We have been able to improve on our telecommunication infrastructure, because [of] the issue of redundancy for the conventional communications network [if] shut off because of a storm,” Blackmoore stated.
Furthermore, he indicated that concerning the issue of telecommunication sets, “we have over 400”.
“People have been trained at the community level and those sets have been deployed to the people who have been trained,” Blackmoore noted. “And it speaks to our preparedness and our readiness. For the first time since our independence as a nation, we have been able to do our own forecasting and we are able to actually issue our own advisories.”
He added, “So our warning [and] our watches are actually done by ourselves because of the significant improvement we have made over the years in our Met Services.”