EDITORIAL

A Nation Survives

Friday, September 17, 2004

Three years after New York City suffered the horrific terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, the Cayman Islands suffered its own September mayhem. Indeed one only has to read the many poignant messages sent to Cayman Net News by overseas family and friends of local residents to be struck by the similarity of the two events so far as human emotions were concerned.

But, as the debris and destruction from Hurricane Ivan begins to be cleared, as homes begin to be cleaned up and windows opened wide into the September breeze, many Caymanians have made reference to the 1932 hurricane that devastated Little Cayman and Cayman Brac.

In 1932 hurricanes were not tracked and named as today’s technology now enables us to do, and the residents of the Sister Islands would have been caught totally unprepared. However, Grand Cayman was as prepared as it could be for its rival Ivan, but the combination of wind, rain, and storm surge overwhelmed any preparation that could have conceivably be made.

A duty officer at the British Foreign Office in the late evening on Sunday, when all communications with Grand Cayman had been lost for many hours, said there was no need to worry because the island was well prepared. Admittedly, he made this comment in total ignorance of the geography and elevation of the island and its vulnerability to any kind of significant storm surge.

We agree, however, that the National Hurricane Committee and the Government Information Services did a first class job in disseminating information and forewarning residents and visitors that Ivan was approaching and the predicted velocity of the approaching winds.

We have to say that they did a far better job on this occasion than they did in relation to Hurricane Charley just a few weeks earlier. Whether this improvement resulted from our somewhat critical editorial at the time and the supporting remarks of our readers, we cannot say.

Could we have been better prepared? The answer must be yes, in some ways. For example, surely the country can afford to buy a satellite phone for the Governor so he can keep in constant communication with London, who in turn can keep anxious relatives and friends, as well as the media, informed.

As good as the communication was from GIS, the two local papers, the radio, and to some extent local TV stations, there was complacency in terms of communication through the media serving the population’s preference for news from the United States. The Weather Channel’s paltry mentions of the Cayman Islands before switching immediately to Florida’s preparations, seals this point.

We as a country have to develop our own national, public mass communications vehicle. Even though Radio Cayman did an exceptional job prior to losing power and having its building threatened by flooding, we need an entity that is going to put the sole focus on local content when it comes to TV broadcasting.

We need our own broadcasts rather than recorded messages which were incorrectly and repeatedly broadcast for more than 24 hours after the storm had passed.

In the meantime, with more than two months remaining in this year’s hurricane season, local media needs to recognize this critical need and focus programming and news reports to suit such an emergency.

Not only is there a local need for specific and accurate information relating to the Cayman Islands, there is also a huge worldwide interest, as evidenced by the visits to the Cayman Net News website as we informed the world of the Cayman Islands’ condition. On the day after the storm, there were more than 509,000 hits to our site – enough to severely overload our server.

All in all, our web pages were accessed well over one million times in the space of just a few days. The eyes of the world were definitely on us as we survived Hurricane Ivan, and they will continue to be on us as we rebuild.

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