THE National Disaster Risk Management Council has insisted that the Jamaica Defence Force (JDF), the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management (ODPEM) and the local government ministry use disaster assessment technologies — drones and artificial intelligence — to speed up relief response in the wake of disasters.

Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness, who chairs the council, said, “This is something that we recommend strongly…that capability needs to be integrated into our disaster response.”

He was speaking to disaster response agencies last Wednesday at the Ministry of Local Government and Community Development on Hagley Park Road in St Andrew.

“As I flew over the damaged areas the day after Hurricane Beryl hit [on July 3, 2024], I had my notepad, and as I was flying over the coast…I could do a rapid assessment just by flying over and I suspect that the JDF does that with their aerial capabilities, but there are far more efficient technologies using artificial intelligence that can scan areas and tell you which roof was damaged, the extent of the damage, and then you can use that data to make assessments as to how much should be assigned to persons,” the prime minister said.

According to Holness, this data would be of invaluable support to social workers in the field conducting their relief response duties.
“The on-the-ground social worker coming to knock on your door and look, that effort could be enhanced greatly by the deployment of disaster assessment technologies, using the available technologies through drones and artificial intelligence, which would give you rapid assessments which would help to speed up the process of response,” he said.

And, addressing the issue of individuals building in disaster-prone areas despite persistent warnings, the prime minister said the Government “will have to strengthen our settlement policy — our enforcement as it relates to where people settle and how they settle.

“There are communities that are there for years, for decades; it is going to be very difficult to…ask them to move. They are emotionally connected to the community, but my own view is that if you know you are going to build in an area that is [disaster-]prone, the technology to build and build as safely as you can exists.

“We know this is a very sensitive discussion because immediately the thought will come to mind, ‘The Government is trying to displace me’, but I think we need to move away from that because that’s absolutely not what the Government is trying to do. The Government is trying to make you safe,” Holness insisted while noting that since the Government is incapable of relocating everyone all at once, it would prioritise those in the “extremely dangerous positions”.

He said, post-Beryl, it was “clear that the houses that were affected mostly were the houses built in areas known to be disaster-prone”.

“So people who built in swamps or close to swamps, on the gully banks or close to gully banks, built on unstable slopes, those were the houses that were most affected,” the prime minister said, adding that houses built without hurricane straps were also the ones that lost their roofs.

In the meantime, Holness emphasised the need for a trained body of assessors who can be easily activated.

“So that, should a disaster strike, we can mobilise them rapidly and have them in the field quickly and extensively so that the citizen does not have to wait too long before a representative of the State reaches out to them,” he said, pointing out that this was a shortcoming after Beryl.

“The lead in the humanitarian response, certainly in terms of the assessment, would be the Ministry of Labour and Social Security and they would need to have persons who are trained social workers to do this. We didn’t have enough because it meant pulling your social workers from their day job, their normal duties, to now go and transition into a disaster response function — which some of them may not be trained in, some of them may not have had experience in, and, indeed, it is a very intense kind of operation some, of them don’t have the gears to do it, and some of them are victims of the disaster themselves — so what that caused was a delay in the response. And, even if the response was mounted, it took a long time to reach to persons who needed it, so we we’re going to have to rethink,” he said.

Noting that there were challenges in the aftermath of Beryl, with some individuals receiving supplies and assistance more than once while others did not, Holness said the absence of a central database of affected persons contributed to this.

“So we are looking at setting up a kind of centralised database, where, at least in the first instance of the response, everybody can get at least once, because what you find it is that it is those citizens who are in the know and who are connected [who] will get two, three, four, five, times while someone who is not in the know, not properly identified, not connected, gets nothing but is out there being very critical of the system, saying that, ‘See, nobody no care about me,’ when that’s not really the case. It’s just how the system is organised or rather not properly organised, and so one of the things that we’re going to have to do is set up this kind of central database,” he pledged.

Holness said the Ministry of Labour and Social Security and the Ministry of Local Government would take the lead in this effort, adding: “We must embrace technology, certainly in terms of the digitisation and the establishment of the central database; that’s absolutely critical if we’re going to be able to distribute the humanitarian and recovery support in a quick and timely fashion,”

In September last year, Minister of Labour and Social Security Pearnel Charles Jr said post-Hurricane Beryl damage assessments conducted islandwide revealed that more than 13,500 homes were affected during the system’s passage on July 3.