Hon Smith’s call came at the Tuesday, January 5, 2021, sitting of the House of Assembly where legislators debated the Disaster Management Act 2019.

“We have to start planning… we cannot just say we will do things, we have the plan. We have to make a national plan for disaster and that national plan should be public, people should know every single thing in that national plan in terms of surviving,” he said.

Hon Smith said it was the people of the territory who rebuilt the Virgin Islands after the perils of Hurricane Irma in 2017; however, some areas of disaster management needs to be strengthened.

“Generator should be in every single building that's supposed to be a shelter, as well that shelter should be built in a way that it could be used for different things, so when hurricane season strikes you know that's a shelter with partitions where you could keep females on one side, males on another side.”

While supporting the move to have disaster management placed under the purview of under the Local Government, Deputy Speaker of the Virgin Islands House of Assembly (HoA) and At-large representative, Hon Neville A. Smith (AL) has called for the formulation of a national disaster plan.

VI not prepared for another disaster - Hon Smith

Other weaknesses, he said, is that some shelters are in flood-prone areas, telling the HoA the territory is not prepared for another hurricane.

“These are the things that we have to start looking at then we could make sure that we are prepared and ready for disaster,” he said.

According to the Deputy Speaker, the current strategy for hurricane preparedness needs to be re-adjusted to be more proactive, given the realities of climate change.

“I think that we need to sit down and look at stuff like that because we have a lot of shelter on flood zones, it has certain disasters that we could prepare for and certain ones we cannot, but the ones that we could prepare for let, let us prepare,” he said.