On Tuesday, the National Emergency Management Organization (NEMO) began its fourth yearly conference to review its progress and plan for the future. This year, their focus is on maritime security focusing on ports as well as cruise ship tourism. Training officer with NEMO Lt. Col. George Lovell explains how cruise ships are a disaster management concern.
Lt. Col. George Lovell,
"What we are doing here today is a site visit to have a first hand view of the area an incident could possibly happen and to see how best we could come up with plans to deal with such a incident. A scenario could be there's a fire onboard one of these vessels and we would have evacuate people from off the vessel. That fire could lead into maybe we have a mass casualty situation. How would we evacuate people off the vessel? How would we then look after all those injuries that we may have? And so we are looking at hospitalization and we are looking at evacuation procedures."
"We have to secure our investments. The tourism industry is now one of the largest money earner for the country and so as NEMO secretariat, we believe that we must do our part in looking at securing Belize's interests."
The conference is being co sponsored by the government of Belize and the U.S. Southern Command with participants from the Caribbean as well as Central America.
