The Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management (ODPEM), recently carried out a tsunami-simulation exercise for the Caribbean, to raise awareness about the phenomenon and examine early warning signs in place for the region.

Speaking in an interview with JIS News, Director General of ODPEM, Ronald Jackson, the initiative was aimed at assessing and improving these mechanisms.

"It was really to look at our own protocol for dealing with a tsunami threat and to really see how our current resources would be deployed, how our existing early warning mechanisms could be used, to disseminate the warning information out to the last mile," he said.

"What we did, really, was to go through the scenarios that generated within our national emergency operational centre, and then look at what would have been the response by the respective agencies, or the agency with the responsibility," he said.

keep up standards

With regards to Jamaica, the director general said the agency has been working to ensure early warning mechanisms are up to standards and will alert the public to a tsunami threat through SMS texting.

"The next available mechanism is the electronic media. That's quite useful and can be immediate for emergency public address or public broadcast. The other option that is available now is to use the coastguard, the JDF (Jamaica Defence Force) air wing, the marine police and the nearby police patrol cars to go in coastal communities and do the loud hail- up," he says.

Jackson said it is important to know the early warning signs of a tsunami and, most importantly, how to respond in the event a tsunami hits, especially if you live near coastal areas.

"If you feel a violent earthquake and you're on the coastline, it means that you need to head to higher ground," he said.

"Don't wait to hear a message coming across, move, because the timeframe between the event happening and the dissemination may still be very short, as we saw in the case of Japan and other places which are much more advanced with warning information," he said.

He noted that when a tsunami occurs, seawater tends to recede from the shoreline, exposing aquatic life living close to the shore.

Through the tsunami-simulation exercise for the Caribbean, ODPEM was able to assess the country's mechanism and its readiness to respond to an event.