What would you do if a category three hurricane was within striking distance of Belize? That's just the question the Belize Tourism Industry Association (BTIA) asked its members at a hurricane preparedness workshop held today at the Radisson Hotel. The workshop centered around a disaster simulation and had participation from tourism stakeholders, the business community, and the National Emergency Management Organization. We spoke to Andrew Godoy from BTIA and Deidre Shurland from the Caribbean Alliance for Sustainable Tourism (CAST).
Deidre Shurland, Director - CAST
"They are sitting down at the tables there working out in the context of a national plan how they should communicate, what resources they need to do their part of the plan, to activate their part of the plan, and essentially to respond as a community."
Andrew Godoy, Executive Director - BTIA
"We have to protect or ensure that safety of our visitors. One of things you find is that even as a industry, even as an organization, a lot of us have hurricane plans. The BTIA has a hurricane plan but our hurricane plan is in isolation of the national emergency plan, it does not include the national emergency plan and that's very important because when you look at, you're talking about visitors in country, having a plan that says you secure your building and you do this and you do that is not really helping the wider industry.
What we need is a plan that plugs into the national plan that says, should a natural disaster, for instance a hurricane category four or five or whatever it is, is approaching Belize, how do we inform the industry, how do we inform the consulates, how do we keep count of the visitors that are in country, how do we notify the properties, when to evacuate, what measures to take and they in turn need to plug into our plans where we will have all the contact information on them and that type of thing. So we are vulnerable in this situation and there has to be some direct channel that you follow."
The workshop was facilitated by the Caribbean Alliance for Sustainable Tourism.
