The recovery of Caribbean islands hardest hit by recent hurricanes, including Dominica, Barbuda, Turks and Caicos, the British Virgin Islands and Anguilla, could cost up to US$1 billion, a senior UN official said yesterday.
“It’s going to be a large-scale rebuilding effort that will take time,” said Stephen O’Malley, the UN resident coordinator for Barbados and the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States, “and it will be important to do that right.”
He told UN correspondents in a phone briefing from Dominica that “we don’t have exact figures yet,” but for the worst-affected islands the recovery bill will be “half a billion to a billion dollars.”
O’Malley said the United Nations, World Bank and Antigua government have conducted a post-disaster needs assessment for Barbuda, whose 1,800 residents were evacuated to Antigua before Hurricane Irma damaged 95 per cent of its structures on September 14.
And he said a similar assessment will be done in Dominica, which was ravaged on September 18 by Hurricane Maria, a Category 5 storm, probably in about three weeks.
“They want to build back better and they take that very, very seriously — to make sure that that can be done,” O’Malley said.
Compared with the situation a week ago, O’Malley said he could already see some green returning to the almost totally brown island, streets were clear, roads were opening up, power and water supplies were being restored and the port was open. Now, he said, power and water need to be restored to everyone on Dominica and the economy needs to start operating quickly.
