Minister of Home Affairs Wilfred Abrahams said the Government’s clean-up following the ashfall from the eruption of the La Soufriere volcano in neighbouring St Vincent has intensified.
Abrahams said Gvernment has embarked on “the most massive emergency clean-up campaign in the history of Barbados” to bring life in the island back to “regularity”.
“I don’t think there has ever been a clean-up campaign as intense as this involving as many sectors as this,” he said during a Government virtual media briefing on Friday.
“We are trying to get the major installations of Government opened so that we can get ourselves back to some degree of regularity.”
He said: “The [ash] has not affected us in the same way it had during the initial eruption [last Friday] and we have a lessening of the ash fallout over the country.
“We are trying to get the country cleaned, so that people can return to work and some degree of normalcy because we were on lockdown (for COVID-19) for a while, and as we came out of [that] lockdown, we effectively went into another lockdown.”
Abrahams said his ministry and the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Investment will lead a damage assessment of the country on Monday.
“This will provide a qualitative and financial costing of the impact of the hazard, identify in detail our resource needs and allow us to be specific in our request for assistance to deal with our post-event recovery,” he said.
“This is an intensive, rapid assessment, which we have already started gathering critical information. It covers agriculture, infrastructure, technology, utilities and every sector that we expect to be affected by the ashfall.”
Abrahams said the government had spared no effort to get the airport and the seaport opened because it was critical to effective running of the country.
“People have been commenting that we are trying to get the airport open to receive tourists, but it is not that simple,” he said.
“Having the airport and the seaport closed effectively cuts off Barbados from the rest of the world and we cannot receive supplies of any kind. We can’t get vaccines in. We can’t get tests in. We can’t get basic food supplies in.
“Even our customary sending of COVID-19 samples of CARPHA [Caribbean Public Health Agency] in Trinidad in order to test the samples outside of Barbados for certain variants, we have been unable to do because the Regional Security System plane has been grounded with the closure of the airport and the closure of our airspace.”
Abrahams said the seaport continued to service vessels, as well as loading and off-loading cargo.
He said delivery of containers was paused on Friday to facilitate the servicing of air-conditioning systems and to clean up the roadways and cargo-stacking areas.
The minister said Shed 4 had restarted operations fully on Friday and Shed 2 will be ready on Monday.
Abrahams said the clean-up of fish markets will be completed late on Friday and the government was grateful for the assistance given by the fish vendors, and the markets will reopen on Monday.
He said there were challenges with ash blowing downhill from surrounding roadways into the fish markets in Conset Bay and Weston, the Ministry of Public Works and Transport to wash down the area.
The minister said the Payne’s Bay fish market will be closed until further notice because the road works along Highway 1 was also contributing to dislocation.
Abrahams said the Government cannot complete the clean-up on its own and residents needed to help themselves.
(AR)
