While Belize now has the all clear from hurricane Beryl, NEMO had previously declared a tropical storm watch, which confused a lot of people who equated a "watch" with a "warning." A watch is less severe, as the Chief Meteorologist explained, whereas a warning means it's time to evacuate if you have to. He differentiated them further this morning.
Ronald Gordon, Chief Meteorologist
"I want to explain to the public what we mean by a watch. There has been a lot of confusion in regards to what a watch is. There's a difference between a watch and a warning for two reasons. A watch means that you get ready, you do not need to take drastic actions, it means you prepare, it's raise your level of preparedness and your alertness to be watching and monitoring carefully. And warning would have been different. If we had issued a warning, it means that it's time to take action, it's time to evacuate if you're in a vulnerable area so certainly those are things that we will move forward along with NEMO to ensure that we coordinate more properly and also to inform the messaging to persons so that they could understand what we mean. We are also going to do a post analysis discussion with our partner NEMO. One of the things we are looking at is to extend the timing for these things because originally 24 hours is what we had for warning but we know that our country has grown in population and so forth, people live in vulnerable areas and may need to move fast so certainly we think that we may need to move beyond that 24 hour period and extend it a bit more, perhaps to 36 hours so that persons can have adequate time to prepare once we issue a warning. Again, I repeat we were under a watch, which meant that conditions may have, tropical storm conditions may threatened the country, not definitely, it's not likely but it may could have affected the country so we need to make those distinctions, very important."
