Barbados Association of Professional Engineers to Homeowners: Protect your investment against disasters

The widespread damage caused by two relatively minor storms within the space of a month exposes significant flaws across the country’s infrastructural landscape. 

And according to the President of the Barbados Association of Professional Engineers (BAPE), the impact of such systems will only get worse until the Government makes good on its promise to implement minimum building standards.

As Tropical Storm Elsa took aim at Barbados, Lieutenant Colonel Trevor Browne lamented that in many instances, the country’s infrastructure has remained unchanged since the 1955 rebuild that followed Hurricane Janet.

“There are a number of reasons for that, and one of those reasons is that we have been lucky for decades, so what we have is an old untested system,” the BAPE president told Barbados TODAY. 

“If you look at some of the other islands, Dominica, for example, you have a situation where your weak structures blow down every ten years. When you rebuild them, you tend to rebuild them with hurricanes in mind and even then, you see the kind of damage they suffer. 

“If you are like Barbados, where we haven’t had a really really serious hit since [Hurricane] Janet, it means that we have lots of houses that have been standing for 10 to 20 to 30 years that are not built to standard, people taking shortcuts whenever they have to make adjustments. The exposure is significant. That is the frightening truth. I really wouldn’t want to speculate, but it could be quite significant,” the Lieutenant Colonel added. 

He noted that he was extremely impressed with seemingly “genuine promises” from Prime Minister Mia and efforts to make changes to the Town and Country Planning Act as well as the Planning and Development Act, that have not yet come to fruition.

“We have to admit that the Prime Minister probably did all that she could. What we have to try to understand is what is wrong with our national implementation systems that can allow something as important, supported by someone as important as the Prime Minister. Yet, we cannot get it implemented in Barbados,” Browne contended. 

The BAPE president explained that draft legislation that was drawn up shortly after the destruction caused in September 2019 by Hurricane Dorian in The Bahamas received tremendous support from local agencies.

Hassle stressed that although the creation and implementation of a building code may come at an additional cost, it will ensure the protection of families for decades to come.

This, he argued, is even more important with factors like climate change resulting in more unpredictable weather phenomena. 

“We understand that there are other concerns that might affect and impact on people’s actions – lack of resources, distraction by other important issues like Covid-19, volcanoes, difficulty with employment and difficulty with tourism. But the fact of the matter is that . . . someplace safe to live, the ability to access to utilities, the ability to move around with transportation are fundamental issues and probably even more fundamental than some of the other ones that we are actually worried about,” Browne said. 

“You wouldn’t have to live day-by-day hoping that the walls are not going to crack and the foundations are not going to sink because all the thought that needs to go in upfront to ensure that that doesn’t happen has been done,” he added.

In the absence of meaningful policy changes, Browne added the onus is on each individual to structure their homes based on updated levels of development.

“It makes no sense for people who have reached the level of development that we have in Barbados to be living in houses that can collapse and injure them and their families, just because there is a little storm. We want our children to live better than we did, and then our grandchildren should have even higher standards,” he contended. 

“What the BAPE would call on individuals to do is in the same vein. When you are called on to make decisions to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy a house or thousands of dollars to repair a home, it is worth it to get a professional opinion on what you have to do and then on what is done, so that you can protect your investment.”

This article appears in the 2021 edition of BT’s Disaster Preparedness. Read the full publication here.