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Hurricanes, prejudice and plastic
Common Sense
John Maxwell
Sunday, September 02, 2007
Some of the most arrant nonsense I've ever heard has been generated out of Hurricane Dean. According to some worthies, Dean did not strike us directly, 'because the centre was some miles offshore'. This is like saying that you weren't directly hit by a truck because only the front bumper fractured your skull and the rear wheels didn't run over you.
Hurricanes, prejudice and plastic
Some people think a hurricane is simply the 'eye', which is in fact the area of calm about which the huge system revolves, and that system may be, as in Dean, hundreds of miles across.
My own experience tells me that whatever the weathermen say, the eye passed over Jamaica and was responsible for the one-hour lull we felt starting at about five o'clock on Sunday afternoon. Because hurricanes are so big and so violent, it isn't easy to define them, even with the help of satellite photographs. Part of the reason is that several things are happening at the same time in any hurricane, and certain parts of a hurricane may have more violent winds than other parts.
In addition to this, hurricanes come in various configurations, but all more or less funnel-shaped. This means that while the land near the bottom of the funnel may not be feeling the wind just yet, areas a few hundred feet above sea level may be getting the full blast. Which is why, 20 years ago, I was first amused and then angry, as I listened to radio commentators telling Jamaica that hurricane Gilbert hadn't touched down in Jamaica yet when grown trees were whizzing past my verandah and every road in Stony Hill had been blocked by fallen trees.
According to the experts, Gilbert was only a Category Four hurricane when it crossed Jamaica nearly 20 years ago. But if you went to Red Hills in St Andrew, where you could see the bark stripped from trees you may have different ideas. If you don't believe me, ask Franklin McDonald, who was then head of what is now ODPEM. According to the experts, the bark doesn't get stripped from trees below a Category Five storm.
Again, in Red Hills, it was possible to see the spoor of what were clearly tornadoes within the greater hurricane, leaving devastated tracts, which appeared to have been cleared by bulldozers.
Everybody is now a hurricane expert, including one ineffable jackass who said that the hurricane only knocked down a few shrubs.
A dogwood tree, probably about 100 years-old stood proudly behind my house until Dean. Early in the storm, there was a very strange noise from the direction of the kitchen. The tree had fallen on the house and one of its branches had pierced my kitchen roof. The branch which pierced the roof was six inches in diameter and would have killed me had I been doing what I had intended to do at the time the tree fell: making myself a cup of coffee. Fortunately, for me, electricity had failed a little while before.
The main trunk is at least 24 inches across, bigger nearer the roots. If this was a shrub, I am George Bush.
Another stupidity is in comparing some of the damage done by Dean with the damage done by Ivan and Gilbert.
Dean didn't blow down as many trees, they say, forgetting that there hadn't been a major hurricane for 27 years before Gilbert so that many of the trees destroyed then were not available to be destroyed either by Ivan or Dean. They haven't considered the fact that trees that survived both Gilbert and Ivan fell to Dean. Oops!
But there are many newly minted experts who will tell you that Dean was no big thing compared to Ivan or Gilbert. As I look across at the tree in my kitchen and at my neighbours' backyards, hidden by trees two weeks ago, I beg to differ. And, of course, you could ask people in Old Harbour, Portland Cottage and all across southern Jamaica. The media forgot St Thomas and Portland, as usual, where the storms almost always come to ground, and even St Elizabeth where most of our food is grown.
Better construction, less damage
Part of the reason there is progressively less damage from the same wind speeds is that people build more safely, by and large, after every hurricane. People are better prepared and they pay more heed to the warnings.
Downgrading the hurricane seems to be aimed at downgrading the government's actions immediately after the storm. People are ready to believe that the State of Emergency was a gimmick, although the media should have known that in several communities there was intelligence that organised looting and other mischief was planned for after the hurricane. It is just possible that the State of Emergency may have averted that. We shall never be able to know.
Within three days of the hurricane Mr Bruce Golding, leader of the opposition in a political advertisement, was blaming government "confusion and bureaucracy" for what he said was the failure to get emergency aid flowing to those who needed it. After about three more days he dropped that part of his advertisement. One does not have to be a fan of the prime minister or a supporter of the PNP to be aware that relief and reconstruction are better organised this time than ever before. And why not? We would be fools not to have prepared for this disaster when we all knew that it was possible and even likely. We need to remember that it was only in 1980, just before Hurricane Allen, that the Office of Disaster Preparedness was established and some of us remember the disbelief that greeted its formation.
Some of us had experienced the 1979 June floods in western Jamaica and realised that much more was needed than the ad hoc efforts; as good as, they were, of volunteer groups such as the Red Cross and the St John's Ambulance Brigade.
What is amazing to me is that while the director of elections is being praised for having his apparatus ready to run, the people who made it possible, the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management, have not got much credit.
As one of those involved, however peripherally, in its establishment, I feel proud that the ODPEM has demonstrated that while we are not yet as good as Cuba in protecting our people and our environment, we are better than New Orleans and other American cities and a great deal more fortunate than Haiti and the Dominican Republic and most other West Indian countries.
People like Franklin McDonald, Barbara Carby and their successors are owed a great deal by this country for the fact that we do not find ourselves as distraught as New Orleans still is more than two years after Katrina.
Press, polls and the people
If the polls are to be believed the Jamaica Labour Party was making important gains before the hurricane. If that is so, I am puzzled by the JLP's rush to push the elections forward as soon as possible after the hurricane. Given more time their momentum may very well have pushed them ahead of the ruling PNP. As it is, they are getting some bad reviews from the man without a roof who feels that relieving suffering is more important than elections.
While the media appear to believe that the election is almost in the bag for the JLP, some of the commentaries read like party propaganda. In Sunday's Gleaner, the bias could not have been more obvious, when one PNP candidate was called a 'turncoat' - an appellation applied to no other candidate. The cream of partisan bias was published in Tuesday's Gleaner, below the fold on page 3.
I quote the item in full:
"Correction & clarification
In a Page A1 story yesterday we incorrectly reported that 49 per cent of respondents in the latest Gleaner Bill Johnson commissioned poll said Bruce Golding would perform better than Portia Simpson Miller as Prime Minister. Mr Golding's correct support is 40 per cent while support for Mrs Simpson Miller is 45 per cent."
End of story. Really! That was that!
Amazing!!!
And media want to know why ordinary people don't believe them.
In the page one story on Monday, under the subhead Preferred PM the Gleaner reported:
"In terms of which leader can better perform the job as Prime Minister, 45 per cent of respondents in Johnson's poll identified Simpson Miller while 49 per cent chose Golding. Analysis of Johnson poll findings for the past three months indicates that Simpson Miller's ratings as the preferred Prime Minister have remained constant while Golding's figures have increased by nine points."
It would seem to me that if the story were to be properly corrected and clarified, the commentary should also have been 'corrected and clarified'.
And if one is to be truly transparent and honest, the correction should have been printed on page one, like the original mistake.
Globalisation and ice cream
I am a one-man boycott of Nestlé, one of the world's largest food processing companies. The reason: to increase their profits Nestlé shut down their Jamaican operations, putting hundreds of workers out of jobs and devastating the dairy industry and its workers.
The company bought Royal Cremo and moved its operations to the Dominican Republic. I will not knowingly buy or consume any ice cream or any other Nestlé product wherever possible. We pay more for their lower-cost Dominican products; they make vastly more profit.
My wife brought home some ice cream after power was restored at home three days ago. The brand was new to me; I examined the box; it was made in New Zealand.
This is clearly taking a joke too far.
New Zealand is just about as distant from Jamaica as you can get without space travel. Yet our farmers cannot find a market for their milk and cannot move into more advanced production - butter, cheese, and yoghurt - because European subsidies to their farmers prevents us developing a sophisticated dairy industry. Ninety years ago the Jamaican farmer supplied Kingston with firkins of butter, the Jamaica Government Railway transported 50 tons of it to Kingston in 1919. In Cuba, they make their own Camembert; here we dump milk. We now import peeled garlic from China!
This is the reality of globalisation: the triumph of the usurer and the shopkeeper over the forces of production and the basic instincts of civilisation. A man cannot be truly civilised without meaningful work. But if a Jamaican owns a small shoe factory, say, and the government wished to give him an incentive to produce more, using more local materials and more Jamaican craftsmen, we will fall foul of the General Agreement on Trade in Services as well as the agreements on investment, which mandate that if Jamaica is to give incentives to a shoemaker who is Jamaican - or to a university for that matter - it is bound to offer the same incentives to any foreigner who comes claiming to be an investor.
When I wrote about this more than a decade ago, people said I was talking nonsense. Just mind you, don't step in the ice cream.
For me the last few weeks have been a kind of gustatory purgatory. I live on tonic water, all that remains of my long-dead habit of giving incentives to the makers of vodka, brandy and other distilled spirits. So for nearly 20 years the most ardent liquid to pass my lips has been tonic water, made they say from quinine, but maybe bitter damsel or quassia. For some weeks, there has been an almost total unavailability of my favourite tipple, made in Jamaica by a multinational, but at least the water is Jamaican.
Instead, I have been forced to buy an inferior substitute from Trinidad, made by 'Shh! You know who' - as the ads used to say. The problem is that while I think importing water from Trinidad is obscene, the transaction is even more evil; the bottles are non-returnable, which means that whoever imports the stuff is contributing in a big way to environmental degradation, as I do by drinking the stuff.
I am giving it up. But it is almost impossible for most of us to avoid the flood of glass and plastic, which ends up in our rivers and gullies, on our beaches and in the sea, choking the reefs and the fish.
Whoever forms the new government in a few days must be pressured by all of us to restore some environmental sanity to our lives.
It is not a luxury. If we don't clean-up our acts, literally, we will perish, just like the fish, the birds, and all the other 'natural resources' which sustain us.
Whenever, I look out over Kingston Harbour, I see the world's most beautiful cesspool. Whenever it rains, Hunt's Bay turns red with the blood of this island and the hopes and dreams of its people.
Endnote: I still have neither landline phone nor Internet access. Please bear with me.
Copyright 2007John Maxwell
jankunnu@gmail.com
Common Sense
John Maxwell
Sunday, September 02, 2007
Some of the most arrant nonsense I've ever heard has been generated out of Hurricane Dean. According to some worthies, Dean did not strike us directly, 'because the centre was some miles offshore'. This is like saying that you weren't directly hit by a truck because only the front bumper fractured your skull and the rear wheels didn't run over you.
Hurricanes, prejudice and plastic
Some people think a hurricane is simply the 'eye', which is in fact the area of calm about which the huge system revolves, and that system may be, as in Dean, hundreds of miles across.
My own experience tells me that whatever the weathermen say, the eye passed over Jamaica and was responsible for the one-hour lull we felt starting at about five o'clock on Sunday afternoon. Because hurricanes are so big and so violent, it isn't easy to define them, even with the help of satellite photographs. Part of the reason is that several things are happening at the same time in any hurricane, and certain parts of a hurricane may have more violent winds than other parts.
In addition to this, hurricanes come in various configurations, but all more or less funnel-shaped. This means that while the land near the bottom of the funnel may not be feeling the wind just yet, areas a few hundred feet above sea level may be getting the full blast. Which is why, 20 years ago, I was first amused and then angry, as I listened to radio commentators telling Jamaica that hurricane Gilbert hadn't touched down in Jamaica yet when grown trees were whizzing past my verandah and every road in Stony Hill had been blocked by fallen trees.
According to the experts, Gilbert was only a Category Four hurricane when it crossed Jamaica nearly 20 years ago. But if you went to Red Hills in St Andrew, where you could see the bark stripped from trees you may have different ideas. If you don't believe me, ask Franklin McDonald, who was then head of what is now ODPEM. According to the experts, the bark doesn't get stripped from trees below a Category Five storm.
Again, in Red Hills, it was possible to see the spoor of what were clearly tornadoes within the greater hurricane, leaving devastated tracts, which appeared to have been cleared by bulldozers.
Everybody is now a hurricane expert, including one ineffable jackass who said that the hurricane only knocked down a few shrubs.
A dogwood tree, probably about 100 years-old stood proudly behind my house until Dean. Early in the storm, there was a very strange noise from the direction of the kitchen. The tree had fallen on the house and one of its branches had pierced my kitchen roof. The branch which pierced the roof was six inches in diameter and would have killed me had I been doing what I had intended to do at the time the tree fell: making myself a cup of coffee. Fortunately, for me, electricity had failed a little while before.
The main trunk is at least 24 inches across, bigger nearer the roots. If this was a shrub, I am George Bush.
Another stupidity is in comparing some of the damage done by Dean with the damage done by Ivan and Gilbert.
Dean didn't blow down as many trees, they say, forgetting that there hadn't been a major hurricane for 27 years before Gilbert so that many of the trees destroyed then were not available to be destroyed either by Ivan or Dean. They haven't considered the fact that trees that survived both Gilbert and Ivan fell to Dean. Oops!
But there are many newly minted experts who will tell you that Dean was no big thing compared to Ivan or Gilbert. As I look across at the tree in my kitchen and at my neighbours' backyards, hidden by trees two weeks ago, I beg to differ. And, of course, you could ask people in Old Harbour, Portland Cottage and all across southern Jamaica. The media forgot St Thomas and Portland, as usual, where the storms almost always come to ground, and even St Elizabeth where most of our food is grown.
Better construction, less damage
Part of the reason there is progressively less damage from the same wind speeds is that people build more safely, by and large, after every hurricane. People are better prepared and they pay more heed to the warnings.
Downgrading the hurricane seems to be aimed at downgrading the government's actions immediately after the storm. People are ready to believe that the State of Emergency was a gimmick, although the media should have known that in several communities there was intelligence that organised looting and other mischief was planned for after the hurricane. It is just possible that the State of Emergency may have averted that. We shall never be able to know.
Within three days of the hurricane Mr Bruce Golding, leader of the opposition in a political advertisement, was blaming government "confusion and bureaucracy" for what he said was the failure to get emergency aid flowing to those who needed it. After about three more days he dropped that part of his advertisement. One does not have to be a fan of the prime minister or a supporter of the PNP to be aware that relief and reconstruction are better organised this time than ever before. And why not? We would be fools not to have prepared for this disaster when we all knew that it was possible and even likely. We need to remember that it was only in 1980, just before Hurricane Allen, that the Office of Disaster Preparedness was established and some of us remember the disbelief that greeted its formation.
Some of us had experienced the 1979 June floods in western Jamaica and realised that much more was needed than the ad hoc efforts; as good as, they were, of volunteer groups such as the Red Cross and the St John's Ambulance Brigade.
What is amazing to me is that while the director of elections is being praised for having his apparatus ready to run, the people who made it possible, the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management, have not got much credit.
As one of those involved, however peripherally, in its establishment, I feel proud that the ODPEM has demonstrated that while we are not yet as good as Cuba in protecting our people and our environment, we are better than New Orleans and other American cities and a great deal more fortunate than Haiti and the Dominican Republic and most other West Indian countries.
People like Franklin McDonald, Barbara Carby and their successors are owed a great deal by this country for the fact that we do not find ourselves as distraught as New Orleans still is more than two years after Katrina.
Press, polls and the people
If the polls are to be believed the Jamaica Labour Party was making important gains before the hurricane. If that is so, I am puzzled by the JLP's rush to push the elections forward as soon as possible after the hurricane. Given more time their momentum may very well have pushed them ahead of the ruling PNP. As it is, they are getting some bad reviews from the man without a roof who feels that relieving suffering is more important than elections.
While the media appear to believe that the election is almost in the bag for the JLP, some of the commentaries read like party propaganda. In Sunday's Gleaner, the bias could not have been more obvious, when one PNP candidate was called a 'turncoat' - an appellation applied to no other candidate. The cream of partisan bias was published in Tuesday's Gleaner, below the fold on page 3.
I quote the item in full:
"Correction & clarification
In a Page A1 story yesterday we incorrectly reported that 49 per cent of respondents in the latest Gleaner Bill Johnson commissioned poll said Bruce Golding would perform better than Portia Simpson Miller as Prime Minister. Mr Golding's correct support is 40 per cent while support for Mrs Simpson Miller is 45 per cent."
End of story. Really! That was that!
Amazing!!!
And media want to know why ordinary people don't believe them.
In the page one story on Monday, under the subhead Preferred PM the Gleaner reported:
"In terms of which leader can better perform the job as Prime Minister, 45 per cent of respondents in Johnson's poll identified Simpson Miller while 49 per cent chose Golding. Analysis of Johnson poll findings for the past three months indicates that Simpson Miller's ratings as the preferred Prime Minister have remained constant while Golding's figures have increased by nine points."
It would seem to me that if the story were to be properly corrected and clarified, the commentary should also have been 'corrected and clarified'.
And if one is to be truly transparent and honest, the correction should have been printed on page one, like the original mistake.
Globalisation and ice cream
I am a one-man boycott of Nestlé, one of the world's largest food processing companies. The reason: to increase their profits Nestlé shut down their Jamaican operations, putting hundreds of workers out of jobs and devastating the dairy industry and its workers.
The company bought Royal Cremo and moved its operations to the Dominican Republic. I will not knowingly buy or consume any ice cream or any other Nestlé product wherever possible. We pay more for their lower-cost Dominican products; they make vastly more profit.
My wife brought home some ice cream after power was restored at home three days ago. The brand was new to me; I examined the box; it was made in New Zealand.
This is clearly taking a joke too far.
New Zealand is just about as distant from Jamaica as you can get without space travel. Yet our farmers cannot find a market for their milk and cannot move into more advanced production - butter, cheese, and yoghurt - because European subsidies to their farmers prevents us developing a sophisticated dairy industry. Ninety years ago the Jamaican farmer supplied Kingston with firkins of butter, the Jamaica Government Railway transported 50 tons of it to Kingston in 1919. In Cuba, they make their own Camembert; here we dump milk. We now import peeled garlic from China!
This is the reality of globalisation: the triumph of the usurer and the shopkeeper over the forces of production and the basic instincts of civilisation. A man cannot be truly civilised without meaningful work. But if a Jamaican owns a small shoe factory, say, and the government wished to give him an incentive to produce more, using more local materials and more Jamaican craftsmen, we will fall foul of the General Agreement on Trade in Services as well as the agreements on investment, which mandate that if Jamaica is to give incentives to a shoemaker who is Jamaican - or to a university for that matter - it is bound to offer the same incentives to any foreigner who comes claiming to be an investor.
When I wrote about this more than a decade ago, people said I was talking nonsense. Just mind you, don't step in the ice cream.
For me the last few weeks have been a kind of gustatory purgatory. I live on tonic water, all that remains of my long-dead habit of giving incentives to the makers of vodka, brandy and other distilled spirits. So for nearly 20 years the most ardent liquid to pass my lips has been tonic water, made they say from quinine, but maybe bitter damsel or quassia. For some weeks, there has been an almost total unavailability of my favourite tipple, made in Jamaica by a multinational, but at least the water is Jamaican.
Instead, I have been forced to buy an inferior substitute from Trinidad, made by 'Shh! You know who' - as the ads used to say. The problem is that while I think importing water from Trinidad is obscene, the transaction is even more evil; the bottles are non-returnable, which means that whoever imports the stuff is contributing in a big way to environmental degradation, as I do by drinking the stuff.
I am giving it up. But it is almost impossible for most of us to avoid the flood of glass and plastic, which ends up in our rivers and gullies, on our beaches and in the sea, choking the reefs and the fish.
Whoever forms the new government in a few days must be pressured by all of us to restore some environmental sanity to our lives.
It is not a luxury. If we don't clean-up our acts, literally, we will perish, just like the fish, the birds, and all the other 'natural resources' which sustain us.
Whenever, I look out over Kingston Harbour, I see the world's most beautiful cesspool. Whenever it rains, Hunt's Bay turns red with the blood of this island and the hopes and dreams of its people.
Endnote: I still have neither landline phone nor Internet access. Please bear with me.
Copyright 2007John Maxwell
jankunnu@gmail.com
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