Oh No Jamaica..!!!

Marley Farley · Oct 31, 2010

:dh: This year has seen allot of tropical storms around the Caribbean, but none toooo serious.... !!

:( Now though it looks like Tomas is right on course to give Jamaica land a real pasting... My friends are now battening down & moving things to what will hopefully be safety & sorting out the shelters.......... :( Very frightening if you have not experienced anythiing like it & if it is like Ivan or Gilbert... Devastation for Jamaica..!!

Praying that all will be OK & my friends there will be safe.....

This is the latest so far & not looking good it has now moved up to a catagory 2..!! Already..

http://www.stormpulse.com/hurricane-tomas-2010

Victoria · Oct 31, 2010

0) Hello Marley. I have never encountered a hurricane but have encountered many tornadoes, the worst of which 34 died in our town and the building where t'other half worked was flattened. Nature can be very cruel at times.

I hope your friends and their homes (and yours) will escape any serious damage.

Marley Farley · Oct 31, 2010

:dh: Thankfully not done a Hurricane either Vicky but have done a few "Tropical storms" & there is usually a tornado in it somewhere.. I have been lucky enough to have always been in a least storm ravaged & damaged area.. Although we only just missed Nicole a few weeks ago & it did do damage in our area.. Sav suffered a tornado as well as flooding.. Frome where the sugar company is & all the cane fields around the area flooded.. Roads were closed by flash floods & many were washed away, bridges too.. Most of our friends were OK with minimal damage but one friend lost her house & most of her possessions..
She & her family were trying to start again when we left..!!

At present this storm is barrelling straight for Jamaica & gaining speed.. Now I know anything could happen & Tomas could change direction or even slow down, but the NHC seem to think it is on course for Jamaica & will be powerful, so I am now watching to see & talking to friends over there..
Barbara & her family are boarding up & battening down our little places.. Just hoping now... :(

Sussexgardener · Oct 31, 2010

Fingers crossed for the island and your friends Marley

Phil A · Oct 31, 2010

Blimey Marley, hope it misses.

One of our mods on Anglers Net keeps his eye on the hurricains for us, Hes called Newt & lives in the USA.

Hes already flagged "thomas" up on this thread,

http://www.anglersnet.co.uk/forums/Rough-Weather-t2474567.html

You might want to keep your eye on that one too, as Newt will be on the button with updates.

Marley Farley · Oct 31, 2010

Cheers Ziggy I shall book mark him & maybe talk to him too... :gnthb: thanks mate... :gnthb:

Phil A · Oct 31, 2010

No worries Marley, hope everything works out ok.

Newt is a good man, just tell him Ziggy sent you :wink:

Marley Farley · Nov 1, 2010

:thumb: I have bookmarked Newt's page thanks Ziggy, but it looks like it might miss Jamaica, but head for Haiti...... Jamaica will still get allot of wind & rain which they could do without in our Parish of Westmoreland..... This was the latest today from Jamaica......

Fair weather conditions persist across Jamaica, as it has been for the past week and a half. Each day, we have seen sunny skies and partly cloudy afternoons with highs daily at 86 deg F /30 deg C and light sea breezes from the NE at 10mph .Nice weather especially for the holiday vacationers. Jamaicans continues to closely monitor, now weakened Tropical Storm Tomas. Prime Minister, Hon. Bruce Golding, has called a special meeting of the country's emergency relief agencies for this morning ( Monday Nov. 1) at 9:00am , amidst forecasts that then hurricane Tomas could produce heavy rainfall and gusty winds ,especially over Eastern Parishes on Friday.

We should get let our guards down because Tomas has weakened and the forecast now has it hitting. Haiti. We should continue to be vigilante especially with restrengthening forecast and what is now appearing to be a shift west in some of the computer guidance which would put Tomas closer to the Eastern end of the Island.
Click to expand...

That is dreadful too for Haiti......... They have enough problems with the homelessness & lack of help & government from the Quake still, never mind the Cholera outbreak.......!!!!!

I pray that Tomas will stay at just a tropical storm for them otherwise we could end up with a much much bigger Cholera outbreak........!!!

Jamaica & other close Caribbean Islands to Haiti are now on a full Cholera Alert at all their entry ports & airports, but that won't stop it.... If they start leaving Haiti in panic as they will make land where they can........

Phil A · Nov 1, 2010

Its not good news whichever way it goes. From what i read, people are getting cholera from drinking river water, lets hope enough rain gets caught for drinking water. Might be a tall order though with the place still in chaos.

Marley Farley · Nov 1, 2010

Ziggy it it terrible to be honest... There is no government to help them & there is only so much aid workers can do..... The black market in selling children to people on the Dominican Republic border is now horrendous... The sad thing is the parents do it thinking their kids will have a better life....... Sadly so far from the truth.......

This is heart breaking & despicable....!!!!!
http://www.gardenerscorner.co.uk/forum/monthly-photo-comp-october-2010-t30150.html

I don't know how thy are going to overcome this but it is really frightening to think of the world consequences if it gets out of Haiti....... Could this be our next Pandemic........ I am not being a scaremonger but the thought of what it could become is far more frightening than Bird Flu....!!!!!! :yez: :(
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ca...qM5hbCdp2XF2aWbR2rozR0u2vXAu2Rw?docId=4999558

maksim · Nov 1, 2010

Marley Farley said:
:dh: This year has seen allot of tropical storms around the Caribbean, but none toooo serious.... !!

:( Now though it looks like Tomas is right on course to give Jamaica land a real pasting... My friends are now battening down & moving things to what will hopefully be safety & sorting out the shelters.......... :( Very frightening if you have not experienced anythiing like it & if it is like Ivan or Gilbert... Devastation for Jamaica..!!

Praying that all will be OK & my friends there will be safe.....

This is the latest so far & not looking good it has now moved up to a catagory 2..!! Already..

http://www.stormpulse.com/hurricane-tomas-2010
Click to expand...

Sometimes I wonder how can be possible that human beings have decided to settle in some world dangerous zone.
I think about people who live near vulcanoes, I think about people who live in hearthquake zones, I think about people who live in extreme climate zone (such severe cold zone as Alaska, Sibiria, Canada, etc. as well as such stormy lands as the tropical ones, as well as such hot dry desert zones as Sahara, Arizona, interior of Australia, etc.
I mean: I live in a zone that, as a whole, has a mild climate, has no vulcanoes, no hearthquakes, etc.
The British themselves have chosen a lovely land that has no extreme climate, no vulcanoes, no tropical storms, no heartquake, etc.
But, for example, some italians like I am, have chosen to live near vulcanoes (I mean Naples, Sicily) or however in lands of hearthquake.
I can not understand...
I am aware of the fact that these lands offer many good resources...
However they can be extremely risky for the reasons that I mentioned.
Of course nowadays, thanks to technology, men can manage to live despite of hearthquakes (I think about California, Japan) or Vulcanoes (I think about Fuji vulcano in Japan or Islanda or Haway or Tenerife, etc.).
Anyway, how could it possible that they decided, in many cases, to live there when they were unable to cope with catrostofic events ???
I remind, for example, that in Pompei (near Naples, near vulcan Vesuvio), an entire population was sweeped out by a blasty vulcano's eruption...
It occured about 2,000 years ago.
Probably they were even unaware of the fact that the mountain in the backstage was a vulcano...
Anyway the question is still the same: "Men do it on purpose when they decide to live (or to go to) in dangerous zones ??? :cnfs: :cnfs: "

Sussexgardener · Nov 6, 2010

Any news on your friends or what is happening in Jamaica? I heard on the radio today that the storm has been downgraded to a less destructive catagory...but that means little if it is still heading straight for you :(

Marley Farley · Nov 6, 2010

Hi Aaron, just got off the phone to Barbara.. Yes downgraded to a Tropical storm.. They have had strong winds & torrential rain causing flash floods & some roads impassable because of floods but all ok otherwise.....

Tomas has behaved & taken a very strange path but tropical storms do that....
It has turned right back on itself at present... !!
http://www.stormpulse.com/hurricane-tomas-2010

It has managed to stay at sea & not hit land although it has passed Haiti Cuba & Turks...!!!

Marley Farley · Nov 7, 2010

:thumb: Jamaica is trying very hard with the present government to be storm prepared this last year & so far they have been very lucky.. We are nearing the end of the hurricane season now & Jamaica has coped very well with the landslides, flash flooding & winds destroying their crops in some parts of the island but others were saved from the storms, but the price of fresh fruit & veg has sky rocketed out there these last couple of weeks since Nicole passed through.. for instance, breadfruits & Akees a staple of their diet are in very very short supply & if you can get them very expensive.. Tomatoes which are used in cooking so any dishes have gone from $60 per lb (60p to us) to $300 per lb (Â£3.00 to us) overnight...
Well if you only earn $900 dollers a day & only work 3 days out of seven as there are not very many tourists, you are desperately trying to feed your family & make ends meet.. Usually cots most of them several hundred dollers to get to work, so quite how they manage sometimes baffles me, but they do, but they live very frugally, eat much less than we do & are a happy people as are the Caribbean peoples are... Despite heir poverty.. Maksim, we all live where we all live, but I thought you might like to read what the Gleaner says today about how they do try....!! I subscribe to a couple of papers on line to keep up with what I can:thumb:

Bouquets and brickbats

Published: Sunday | November 7, 2010 0 Comments and 0 Reactions

Residents of De La Vega City in Spanish Town clean a drain on White Church Street in preparation for the passage of Tropical Storm Tomas last Thursday. - Ricardo Makyn/Staff Photographer

Martin Henry, Gleaner Writer

Up to the time of writing, 'Tomas', hurricane, tropical storm, weather system, whatever, was still doubtful. But the Government of Jamaica must be commended for the relatively smooth and comprehensive mobilisation for a possible natural disaster.
Public commentators run the serious risk of damaging their standing if they praise the Government for anything, or worse be labelled as a supporter of whichever party forms the administration being commended. There seems to be an unwritten rule somewhere, that the business of analyst/commentator is to find fault and to shout disaster. This column, from its very inception in 1987, 23 years ago to the month, has chosen to disregard that 'rule'. The finest compliment the column has been paid, consistently, is for [COLOR=blue ! important][COLOR=blue ! important]fairness[/color][/color] and balance.
Hurricane Gilbert taught us some bitter lessons about unpreparedness and complacency, and since the 1980s governments of Jamaica, on shoestring budgets, have built up an admirable system of disaster preparedness and emergency management around the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management. Some of its finest results are the general awareness and responsiveness of the population, the reduction of loss of life, and the speed of restoration and rehabilitation.
Early last week, the head of the Government, Prime Minister Bruce Golding, with Tomas still several days and hundreds of miles away, pulled the "troops" together for a strategy meeting. He then got out of their way and was off to Barbados, after Tomas had visited there, for the funeral of David Thompson.
While the system of disaster preparedness and emergency management will need political direction, it does not require the executive management of the political arm of the Government, as the general delivery of state services does not. The integrated network of public agencies for disaster preparedness and emergency management should be allowed to get the job done.
Aid in squatting
But the Government has been a major contributor to natural events, like sustained rainfall or storms, turning into unnatural disasters, and deserves brickbats for that. With Tomas heading our way, a late storm in a whole series of active hurricane seasons, Mayor of Kingston Senator Desmond McKenzie was confessing before an area-council party audience, that politicians of both parties forming government had aided and abetted squatting in disaster-prone areas to secure "pockets of votes". But those pockets of votes have become "pockets of disaster and destruction for the country", McKenzie bluntly told his people.
The management of human [COLOR=blue ! important][COLOR=blue ! important]settlements[/color][/color] and the lack of access of a large segment of the population to land is one of the major disasters unleashed upon this country by its own government, going all the way back to Emancipation. The next major phase of disaster preparedness and emergency management, not to mention economic and social advancement for more Jamaicans, must be access to land and safe and decent housing.Government finds the money to restore and rehabilitate disaster- damaged infrastructure, but cannot find the money for maintenance to prevent, or at least to mitigate the damage in the first place. This is just plain stupid and deserves brickbats. Little, low-[COLOR=blue ! important][COLOR=blue ! important]cost[/color][/color] things like cleaning drains don't get done. But then the costs from avoidable flooding and for rebuilding washed-out roads have to be met. As economic analyst Dennis Chung pointed out one day last week on the newest talk show, 'Jamaica Speaks', on the University of the West Indies' NewsTalk 93 FM radio station, the cost of restoration after Tropical Storm Nicole must be significantly higher than preventive maintenance would have been.
Dependent on aid
And we have grown dependent on foreign aid to bail us out. Badrul Haq, the World Bank representative in Jamaica, has pointed out the painfully obvious, that the country is depending on 100 per cent external financing for meeting recovery costs from Nicole damage.
To prepare for Tomas, the [COLOR=blue ! important][COLOR=blue ! important]prime [color=blue ! important]minister[/color][/color][/color]
has invoked emergency powers that will permit the Government to waive some procurement guidelines which would slow down the preparation. Some of us have been pointing out for a while that the elaborate and grandiose system of procurement that the Government has devised to block 'tief' has become a serious handicap to efficiency in public administration.
The prime minister and Cabinet can wriggle through the legal loophole of emergency powers; agencies, under 'normal' circumstances, must face an obstacle course to order paper clips. The procurement system must be reformed, not stepped around when it suits the executive arm of government. The public service is catching hell with it.
Cholera has popped up in Haiti. And the Government of Jamaica has quickly and thoroughly mounted what appears to be an adequate response to keeping the disease out. Cholera was last here in 1851 with disastrous consequences, claiming the lives of up to 10 per cent of the population. Health Editor Eulalee Thompson, last Wednesday, treated Gleaner readers to an excellent flashback to 'Jamaica's 1851 cholera outbreak'.
The prime minister, 'Doctor' Golding, was well armed by his health technocrats for his cholera prevention speech to Parliament, right down to the biological Latin name for the bacterium, Vibrio cholerae. The Government should have listened more carefully to the health professionals in the national health service before removing user fees. A great deal of bad governance has been foisted upon this country because 'hard-ears' politicians believe that politics can overrule economic realities.
Eradicating disease
Jamaica has an enviable track record of eradicating and controlling infectious diseases. The re-appearance of malaria here was a cause of concern although they were imported cases with apparently no local transmission. The disease caused by a mosquito-transmitted protozoan parasite of the blood, was eradicated here in 1963, a year into independence.
Malaria is still present in Caribbean and Latin American neighbours. The Cornwall Regional Hospital is to be renamed in honour of the man who was minister of health when malaria was declared eradicated, Dr Herbert Eldemire.
While this newspaper has faced a spot of bother, over the manner in which it reported the presentation made to the Public Administration and Appropriations Committee by the head of the Public Sector Transformation Unit (PSTU), Mrs Patricia Sinclair McCalla, the Government is dragging its feet on the reform of the public service.
Prime Minister Golding set up the PSTU to advise on the overhaul of the public service, but, perhaps distracted by political and natural disasters, seems to have lost the drive to see the matter through.
The two biggest calls upon the national budget are debt servicing and public-service salaries. The Government has, commendably engineered the Jamaica Debt Exchange Programme to peg down interest [COLOR=blue ! important][COLOR=blue ! important]payments[/color][/color] on the domestic debt, and has successfully confounded the cavilers at home and abroad. For bouquets, similar bold action must now be swiftly taken on the reform of the public service for both efficiency and cost-savings.
Having laid out the critical issues, including the cost of leave and pensions and rental, and the recommendations for transformation, Mrs Sinclair McCalla did say, "What it needs is a policy decision by Cabinet to move the process forward in terms of some of these critical issues."
Sense of urgency
There are things, she said, "that can be done immediately; you don't need to wait on a green paper to act". Some of the sense of urgency which led to the invoking of emergency powers to circumvent the quagmire of procurement as Tomas approached, is clearly needed here.
There is any number of things to fling brickbats at the Government of Jamaica for. But one more bouquet for today. Education takes the biggest sector slice of the national Budget, but we seldom want to ask the tough return-on-investment questions.
Responding to the facts of high residual illiteracy and semi-literacy in the system, the current iteration of the Government of Jamaica is now rolling out a Grade Seven Intervention Programme (GSIP). This is something I have been advocating for years. The national average scores for language and mathematics in the Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT) are bouncing around in the 50s per cent; and one out of five students, that is 20 per cent, scores less than 33 per cent in language arts.
Assistant chief education officer, D. Mary Campbell, tells us the obvious: "Many of our students transition into secondary schools ill-prepared to access the secondary curriculum." And they leave with little or nothing to show for five years of public, personal and parental investment in their education.
The GSIP is designed to confront head-on, the numeracy and literacy deficiencies these students have, and will use data-driven planning and instructional methods, including the use of culture and the arts, and the Internet, to fix the problems.
Minister of Education Andrew Holness has already declared that, come next year, no student will be allowed to sit the GSAT unless certified as literate. One of my early columns was, 'First teach them to read'. The GSIP definitely deserves a bouquet.
Click to expand...

Phil A · Nov 7, 2010

Things are looking better by the look of this

http://www.cfnews13.com/article/new...mas-expected-to-lose-tropical-characteristics

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Oh No Jamaica..!!!

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Jamaican Weed or South African Plant?

To ID: South Africa or Jamaica!

Jamaican Pumpkin Soup..

Jamaica in November

Jamaican Carrot Cake..

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