Disaster Response

Responding In Saint Lucia

January 7, 2014

Jeremy, a member of the Water Missions International staff, traveled to Saint Lucia last week to help respond to disastrous flooding. Since many are unaware of the situation on the ground in Saint Lucia, we asked Jeremy to share about his time in Saint Lucia. When I got a text message on the 29th of December asking me if I was available to respond to a disaster, I never anticipated that I would be on a plane less than 24 hours later for Saint Lucia. Like most of us in our holiday food-coma, I had not paid close enough attention to the world news to even know of the tragedy that had struck. Yet within an hour of stepping off of the plane, I was looking at a washed out canyon that had been a road—a road where travelers had lost their lives in the surge. Mothers and children were bathing and washing clothes in the now calm waters. However, the damage, as evidenced by the devastated banana crops and layers of mud covering everything, had been done.

Jeremy traveled down to Saint Lucia to help Operation Blessing's disaster response efforts. As a result of the unexpected flooding, all of the city water systems on the island were disrupted with many taking more than a week to get back online. The outlying, rural areas will take much longer before they have renewed access to safe water and the people there are forced to drink from the rivers and any other available sources. Water Missions International, through a partnership with Operation Blessing, sent two Living Water Treatment Systems to the island nation in 2010 as a response to Hurricane Tomas. Locals and ministry officials said that the destruction caused by these freak storms was greater than what had been brought three years earlier by Hurricane Tomas. In addition to attempting to bring these old systems online, my mission was to perform an assessment to see what additional measures might need to be taken by either Water Missions International, Operation Blessing, or additional friends of these ministries.

A team sets up a disaster response safe water treatment system in Saint Lucia. Through partnerships with the local water authority, the Saint Lucian government, nonprofits like Operation Blessing, and the prayerful support of many of you, I am confident that most of the people of Saint Lucia will once again have access to safe water in the coming week. Our efforts will also help the people be better trained and prepared should disaster strike Saint Lucia or the neighboring islands again.

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