#BTEditorial – Change the culture of home-building lest we return to the Janet-era

We wish it weren’t true but Hurricane Elsa could just be a harbinger of what’s in store for the next five months.

Forecasters warned us well in advance of the June 1 start to the Hurricane Season of above-average activity – 17 named storms, eight hurricanes and four major hurricanes,  (category 3 and stronger).

The clear warning is to remain alert and be prepared.

Hurricane Elsa was a sober learning experience. Barbados was able to emonstrate some improvement in its level of preparedness last week. The Barbados Met Office was on point with its warnings, disaster and emergency response officials were on the ball and there appeared to be less of that typical last-minute Barbadian rush.

But equally glaring faults were also exposed.

The ferocious winds of Hurricane Elsa laid bare our vulnerable housing stock and the fact that Barbados continues to operate without a functional building code in 2021.

Hurricane Elsa was a fast-moving Category 1 cyclone but it wreaked havoc with latest reports showing substantial structural damage.

Director of the Department of Emergency Management Kerry Hinds reported: “We have in total 2,372 problems reported, of which there are 1,333 reports of roof damage; 326 reports of other house damage; total house collapse 145…. In terms of incidents per parish, … overall, we have 475 damage reports in the Christ Church area; in St. Michael 605; in St. George 269; in St. Philip 273; in St. Thomas 127; in St. James 147; St. John 119; St. Joseph 58; St. Lucy 68, [and] St. Andrew 105.” St. Peter has a count of 101 house incidents.

It was just over a week before Elsa that the Barbados Association of Professional Engineers (BAPE) raised the alarm that the country’s outdated building code needed urgent attention.

BAPE’s president Lt Col Trevor Browne lamented that while Prime Minister Mia Mottley and the Town Planning Association had worked to develop a new Planning and Development Act that would have addressed the issue, little had changed.

Browne said: “Our bigger concern is the apparent lack of any serious interest in bringing a modern level of professionalism to the national challenge of managing our fragile infrastructure with limited resources.

“The era of management by trial-and-error ended decades ago, and even though the economic cost of continuing with that outdated methodology has been staggering and blatant, it appears that this continues to be the genesis of our plans going forward.”

It took 76 mph winds to prove Lt Col Browne right.

Building codes are critical if Barbados is stand up to the growing frequency and intensity of powerful storms and flooding sure to come our way. According to  experts, building resilience is the key to reducing the burdensome financial costs of natural disasters.

With more extreme weather expected from a warming climate, Barbados has to act now to toughen its standards for how and where new homes are built and how old ones can be upgraded.

We need to do things differently. Hurricane Elsa must force a review and reform of building standards legislation that mitigates the risk posed by high winds and storm surge.

We take Home Affairs Minister Wilfred Abrahams at this word that Barbados would not ignore the lesson from this disaster.

He stressed there must be certain minimum legislative standards for building.

Abrahams declared: “A lot of our housing stock exists already and there is probably very little that you can do to existing houses that people live in. But going forward in terms of building new structures, there must be some minimum level that construction must meet to make us resilient to natural disasters. We should not be getting the level of destruction that we got for the passage of a category 1 hurricane.”

We certainly have qualified experts who can get job done. So let’s get to it. We hope this will not be another case of a storm having passed that survivors rush back and rebuild with Government’s help without the necessary corrections.

We are this close to having our much-vaunted high level of human development knocked right back to September 1955 unless we make significant and lasting change to our building and architectural culture.

We already know how low our pain threshold is – 76 miles per hour.