THE Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management (ODPEM) is yet to give a final estimate on the damage caused by Hurricane Dean last month, blaming the delay on the slowness of the assessment being done by some agencies.

Director general of the ODPEM, Ronald Jackson, said while preliminary estimates for the damage to the health, education, and agriculture sectors are in, the relief agency could not arrive at a total as it “was being hampered by the slowness” of other agencies.

He said final figures are yet to be received for the utility sector, early childhood institutions and the Ministry of Labour and Social Security whose assessment is now 50 per cent complete.

At this point Jackson said the damage to the health sector has been set at $168.4 million, education at $700 million and agriculture at some $4 billion.

With regards to resuscitation of the agricultural sector, Jackson said pledges have been received from several international donor agencies such as the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), the International Development Bank (IDB), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Organisation of American States (OAS).

In the meantime, Jackson said a more “fine-tuned economic assessment of the damage will be done by the Planning Institute of Jamaica”.

“I know they have started the process, I’m not sure when they will finish that but they will capture all the costs associated, direct and indirect and provide some recommendations going forward,” Jackson told the Observer, adding that the analysis will also reflect what percentage of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) the damage was estimated at.

With regards to the issuing of relief supplies, the ODPEM director general said this was pretty much complete although some 10 shelters remain open, housing just under 70 persons across several parishes.

Jackson is, however, issuing a note of caution as to the reconstruction phase of the relief efforts as he said technocrats are weighing the suitability of the locations.

“There are still some concerns, we are in fact carefully rethinking because we don’t want to be in a situation where persons are rehoused in the same level of vulnerability as they were before.

This is something that we, ourselves are recommending that more careful attention be paid to the situation in Portland Cottage, Old Harbour Bay as well as in Manchioneal,” he told the Observer.

“We are recommending that we seek every opportunity to move persons out of the highly vulnerable areas which impact on the State in a challenging way when we have to be responding to these communities every two, three years,” he added.

Jackson said the entities were “confident this issue will be looked at in the coming administration at the policy level”.

“As to how quickly the reconstruction activities will take place, I can’t speak to that at this point. We would have to again look at the whole picture presented by the Ministry of Labour and Social Security once they finish their assessments,” he cautioned.

ODPEM has reported that approximately 2,000 persons were displaced because their homes were totally destroyed as a result of the strong winds associated with Hurricane Dean which swept the island on August 19 wreaking havoc on several housing settlements, obliterating many and leaving sections of the island without access to light and water for days.

The Labour and Social Security Ministry has completed 35,000 assessments of the 70,000 persons it had projected would be assessed.