In response to scepticism from several quarters over his decision to place the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management (ODPEM) under his portfolio, Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness has indicated that the move is temporary.

According to the prime minister, the change was one of several made to the Government to increase operational efficiency and management of the disaster emanating from Hurricane Melissa’s onslaught on October 28.

“It is not unusual for the disaster management entity to be centrally located in the Office of the Prime Minister. Indeed, in previous dispensations this was the case. The reassignment of ODPEM to OPM (Office of the Prime Minister) is not meant to be permanent, I have enough entities on my plate to deal with, but it is important because the Office of the Prime Minister can accelerate coordination and quickly re-mission entities, and for ODPEM we had already undertaken a review and we concluded that there was need for strengthening the mission and increasing its coordinating ability,” Holness said during Wednesday’s special press briefing on the Government’s hurricane response at Jamaica House in St Andrew.

He said since that decision took effect he has already “seen improvements in the functioning of ODPEM”.

“They were tasked to do a few things, one of them would be to strengthen their inventory management system, to put a system in place that delivers real time information. They are well down the wicket with that through support from our information technology authority, and the end objective of that is to answer calls and support the whole idea of transparency,” Holness said.

“Eventually, as soon as the system is up and running, we will be able to publish for the public to see what came in as donations and what went out in terms of their usage and who were the beneficiaries. So the public would be able to see in real time what is the status of donations. That gives confidence to the public, it gives confidence to our donors as well,” Holness said.

“In these matters there should be nothing secret unless a donor country says we don’t want anyone to know what we have given you, which is highly unlikely and has not happened, but we want everybody to know so we have to put a system in place — one that is reliable and one that operates in real time and one that is on time, and so ODPEM is working towards having this inventory management system in place,” he pointed out.

The prime minister also said he has “instructed the ODPEM to develop full situational awareness of the disaster space”.

“One of the challenges that we have had, not just with this disaster but with several other disasters — and that is as a result of the very high level of informality in Jamaica — is that sometimes there are communities that we simply don’t know, they are not on the map, we know them traditionally by word of mouth, informally they are named and described but you can’t geographically identify them on a map and as a result of that, there may very well be communities that are not served in the disaster response,” Holness stated.

In that respect, he said there has been a convergence under ODPEM’s coordinating responsibility under law, all the GIS systems supported by the Geospatial Data Management Branch of the Ministry of Economic Growth and Infrastructure Development.

This, the prime minister said, will serve to “pull together all our geographical information systems so we can see, for example, where are all our schools, where are all our police stations, where are all our shops, where are all our community centres, where are all our electrical installations so that you can plan properly and be able to respond”.

“So we have brought together National Works Agency, the National Environment and Planning Agency, the Ministry of Labour and Social Security, the Jamaica Defence Force, the Jamaica Constabulary Force, but we intend to bring in all GIS information, have it coordinated in one central database so that we are properly able to respond to the disaster,” he added.

Holness said another element of ODPEM’s operations for which directives have been given is for it to rapidly scale up its assessment capabilities.

“And so, in collaboration with the Ministry of Labour and Social Security, which already has an assessment corps of social workers who are in the field, ODPEM would be more on the technical side of assessment, but they have to be coordinated. What we don’t want is to have several assessors out in the field, going at different times, talking to the same people and getting everything confused, so we want to have one central corps of assessors,” the prime minister said.

The data, he said, will be used to determine, for example, the level and scale of reconstruction grants given to individuals.

“If we don’t know the damage then we are just randomly selecting a number to determine how much we should give to persons. So we need proper information, and secondly, if we don’t actually know where the damage is, then how do we reach the people and how do we plan proper routes and develop supply chains and so forth, and so the data is really important,” Holness maintained.

“ODPEM is making progress, and the purpose of the data is to improve the efficiency of the service delivery but also to provide you with the verifiable information that you can use to make your own personal decisions about how you respond to the disaster,” he added.

At the start of the month, Holness, during a ministerial statement to the House of Representatives, announced that ODPEM had been reassigned to his office with immediate effect to strengthen logistical collaboration with the Jamaica Defence Force (JDF) post-Hurricane Melissa. A new director general, Commander Alvin Gayle, who was seconded from the JDF, was also appointed to take leadership and streamline the operations of the entity.