The severe devastation suffered in Carriacou and Petite Martinique due to the passage of Hurricane Beryl has raised the issue of adherence to building codes after many houses were flattened.
Grenada’s Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell says this disaster will have a major impact on the economy as the tri-island State has suffered hundreds of millions of dollars in losses and it will take hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild.
He says the rebuilding process must have resilience factored into it.
“Our building standards and our building codes need to be improved and they need to be adhered to and they need to be enforced. Insurance companies do not insure wooden buildings and so in effect we are facing a situation where large parts of our domestic housing stock is uninsured and we run the risk of putting our housing stock in a position where every time we have a storm or hurricane or some other climatic event that our citizens will not be able to rebuild and it will fall to the government and to the taxpayers to be able to assist them in that regard and so as we begin to think of how we recover and rebuild we are going to have to become a lot more creative, we are going to have to rely on technology, we are going to have to rely on modular housing and we are going to have to ensure that particularly when it comes to roofs that the codes and the standards are improved and that they’re adhered to.” He said.
Grenada’s Prime Minister said that most of the devastation seen as a result of the passage Beryl on the island was due to the poor or substandard construction of many buildings.
