And while the north bears serious watching, the true disaster and human tragedies are from the south. Our team ahs been embedded in various communities there since early this morning – and we’ll have that later on, but first, the word from Belmopan. After an emergency meeting between Cabinet and NEMO this morning, the Prime Minister has declared the south a disaster area. Here’s the announcement.
Hon. Dean Barrow, Prime Minister
“Cabinet has agreed that we declare the Stann Creek District, and that portion of the Belize District that includes Gales Point, a disaster area. Questions have arisen about whether or not we ought to have anticipated the scale of what took place in the Stann Creek District and if so, why we didn’t in fact anticipate. Mr. Frutos has explained to me that this was really a kind of freak occurrence that with the best will in the world, and all the resources in the world, we could not have anticipated.”
Ramon Frutos, Acting Chief Meteorologist
“Sunday afternoon as we can all recall it was raining a lot, especially along the coast, and a small cluster of thunderstorms moved towards the coast of Belize on Sunday night and it just mushroomed.
Conditions in the upper atmosphere were very very favourable for this to continue, a series of thunderstorm activity. All those red areas that you see
there, those are areas where the cloud top is going to the top of the atmosphere. Where it is white, those are very cool cloud tops. Those mean the temperature at that level was almost minus seventy degrees, indicating that you’re having hail coming out of that system, maybe reaching the ground or not.
But what happened there, the unique thing here is that this system did not move much. It just regenerated itself and we were watching it during the course of the night and we knew that rainfall was coming out of that and lots of rainfall. But exactly which areas were to be affected, we could not tell because it is almost impossible to indicate, ‘well the Cayo area will be having flash floods, northern Toledo District, the Belize District, or the Stann Creek Valley,’ which is prone to flash flood.
The flash flood and mud slide warnings were also in the reports from Friday evening. So we were following the warnings that the hurricane center was indicating that associated with the system, you could get flash floods and mudslides.”
