Even disasters present opportunities — something Education Minister Mrs Fayval Williams pointed out during her address to the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA’s) 60th annual conference in Trelawny on Wednesday.

Said she: “Hurricane Beryl accelerated some of the work that needed to have been done decades ago. Some roofs that used to leak will leak no more because they have been replaced as a result of the work that we did to rectify the hurricane damage…”

Yet, we shouldn’t need multi-billion-dollar damage to schools, such as was caused by Hurricane Beryl on July 3, to know that we must build properly.

To be fair to the education minister, that’s a point she also underlined in no uncertain fashion while in Trelawny.

“…I don’t want to depend on a hurricane to do what we ought to be doing in and out of season,” she told teachers.

She also said that, “serious building infrastructure upgrade is still ahead of us”.

It’s obvious that post-Beryl those with the appropriate expertise — not least our master builders — should be assessing construction methods in the context of hurricane force winds.

That’s not only in terms of public buildings, including schools, but commercial structures and private homes. For example, can more be done in terms of building codes and their adherence to minimise roof damage during hurricanes? Also, a succession of minor tremors in recent times is timely reminder that Jamaica has a long history of encounters with catastrophic earthquakes and sits on a major fault.

In relation to hurricanes and tropical storms, it seems to our admittedly untrained eye that the location of buildings, including schools, should also be a consideration as we look ahead.

Let’s consider the iconic all-boys’ Munro College, celebrated for generations as a ‘City on a hill…’ built at Potsdam, Malvern, St Elizabeth in 1856. Elevation at well in excess of 2,000 feet above sea level is non-negotiable but Munro’s founders were surely courting trouble when they located it on the tallest hill in the Santa Cruz Mountains, exposed to the elements from every direction.

Clearly, the old age of buildings at Munro and some other schools hit hard by Beryl contributed significantly to the devastation but we suspect other aspects including location can’t be ignored.

Damage at Munro and neighbouring schools such as all-girls Hampton, Bethlehem College, and Bethlehem Primary — also atop tall hills but at relatively lower elevations — has run into hundreds of millions of dollars.

Thankfully, repair work by Government in partnership with support groups has moved rapidly. It appears that delays for the reopening of school in September will probably be no more than a few days for those institutions mentioned, and others.

We applaud the minister’s good sense in seeking to properly explain to everyone that while priority has to be placed on those institutions with severe infrastructure damage ahead of September reopening, all damaged schools will be repaired in due course.

Said Mrs Williams: “So we’re asking for understanding … It’s just a reality of prioritising the severely damaged schools versus those that are moderately damaged versus those with minor damage”.

The minister must now ensure that repair plans and timelines are obeyed to the letter.