“It came in vertically, punching a hole ten km wide through the atmosphere, generating temperatures so high that the air itself started to burn. When it hit the ground near the Gulf of Mexico, rock turned to liquid and spread outward in mountainous waves, not freezing until it had formed a crater two hundred km across. That was only the beginning of disaster…” Arthur C. Clarke: The Hammer of God

Thus Clarke describes the biggest “documented” disaster to take place in the Greater Caribbean (65 million B.C. approx), last call at the salad bar for the dinosaurs and the beginning of the “countdown to Man”. The former reptilian tenants of the Earth had neither warning nor say over their eviction.

However, though our region continues to suffer the devastating effects of disasters, today we can count on early warning systems which should continue to receive attention on the part of national and regional authorities.

Be that as it may, there has recently been an upsurge in emphasis on this technology on the part of sundry pundits in our region, most alarmingly after the tsunami in South-East Asia, as it has instilled in the populace what amounts to a phantom menace, when confronted with the very real need to tackle the very real reoccurrence of the disasters which no one doubts will continue to affect the Greater Caribbean with growing vigour and frequency: Hurricanes, earthquakes, mudslides and flooding, volcanoes, drought, etc.

Recently, a healthy cross-section of the insular and continental ACS and the United Nations and Pan American Systems, as well as the main disaster agencies of the ACS sub-groups, met at an ACS workshop for National Authorities on Risk Management held in Havana, in a regional effort to implement the Hyogo Framework for Action adopted at the World Conference on Disaster Reduction held in Japan in January 2005. The Meeting was sponsored by Turkey and the United Kingdom as well as the United Nations System and the ACS.

The Meeting aimed at strengthening exchange and cooperation and developing further alliances among ACS countries and institutions with support from the United Nations, regional initiatives such as the ACS and other cooperation agencies. Though participants engaged in hale and hearty debate, there was widespread consensus on the basics.

Though most countries in the region are particularly vulnerable to the effects of hazards, some are better prepared and are ready to offer cooperation. Furthermore, as proven most recently by Ivan last year, two or more ACS Members can be impacted by a single event, which only serves to strengthen the argument for the need to support regional disaster mechanisms and capacities as well as those of the UN, in order to enable them to respond effectively to various disasters simultaneously.

To this effect, the need to enhance the exchange of information on hazard risk reduction, lessons learned and best practices during the whole disaster cycle (preparedness-response-recovery) which begins before early warning, cannot be overstated and neither can the suitability of the ACS to this purpose. For example, the urgency of strengthening regional capacities for early recovery in the aftermath of a disaster, which effectively integrate risk reduction into the recovery process and prevent reconstruction at pre-disaster levels, has been addressed in the ACS CD-ROM on building codes against earthquakes and hurricanes.