Hurricane Beryl left “a number close to 1 billion Eastern Caribbean dollars” in loss and damage when it moved over St. Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG), affecting mostly the Southern Grenadines on July 1, Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves said.
Gonsalves said that the loss and damages represented some 30% of the country’s gross domestic product.
“Now roughly 40,000 persons, that is 36-37% of our population, those persons were directly affected,” the prime minister said, adding that this did not mean that they were all affected to the same extent.
“… but about 40,000 of our persons, including men, women, children, people of all ages in the households, and in excess of 5,000 households received damage.”
He said this is why there are about 6,000 houses that have to be rebuilt or repaired.
“So this was a major hit,” Gonsalves said, adding that SVG was affected by “12 major weather-related storms or hurricanes” since his government came to office in March 2001.
“We have had the volcanic eruptions of April 2021, and of course, we had the COVID pandemic,” he said.
“We have had to deal with a lot of disasters, and some people take this for granted because we rebuild pretty well after each disaster, speaking to the resilience of our people clearly, but these are major, major climate-related events which cause pain and suffering, loss and damage, and the people who are affected, disproportionately in the worst way, are the poorer members of our community.
“Invariably, their houses are not built as strong as they should be built, and they don’t have a cushion in terms of resources to help them through this difficult period. That is why the government has had to come in to help to rebuild the houses and provide materials,” the prime minister said.
And I will ring Beryl dry for every cent i can get. After all this is an election year and things doesn’t look good for me so I will preach the Gospel of Beryl looking for sympathy and money. Watch ah country.
That means it will cost more than 1 billion dollars to fix it. People brace allyo selves. When the PM start to talk so he is setting up the country to believe borrowing is all justified. NDP seems like comfortable politicians, waiting on their salaries while Massa is running the country into the ground and bawling about hurricanes come and volcanos erupt.