Government leaders said Thursday that plans to rebuild Cayman Brac were well under way on several fronts, but continued to urge residents’ patience in a process that could take six months’ or longer.
‘The panic is gone,’ Leader of Government Business Kurt Tibbetts said Thursday. ‘People have now come to grips with the passing of (Hurricane Paloma).’
Mr. Tibbetts said it would probably take Cayman’s northern-most island longer than six months to ‘get everyone back to their pre-Paloma situation’ with their homes.
On the good news side, he hoped electricity could be fully restored to Cayman Brac ‘perhaps within another month.’
Brac residents were cautioned that this didn’t mean everyone with a house would have power restored. In some cases, Mr. Tibbetts said it would depend on the damage done to the homes.
There were signs that a small portion of normalcy would start to return to the Brac in the early part of next week.
The government administration building on Cayman Brac was expected to open next week, possibly as early as Monday. Cayman Brac High School was to open today for Year 11 and 12 students only. The rest of the school was expected to open up sometime next week.
In the coming weeks, government officials plan to ‘evolve’ the emergency command centre in the Brac to a recovery centre to assist in repairing or rebuilding island homes and businesses..
‘We believe we will have the situation stabilised,’ Mr. Tibbetts said.
However, there are a few logistical issues to be ironed out, including coordination of the various recovery funds that have been established in the wake of Paloma’s 8 November passing.
‘Instead of having a separate operation for rebuilding and one for the National Recovery Fund…it will be much better to combine our efforts,’ Mr. Tibbetts said, adding that he had preliminary discussions with NRF Director Mark Laskin about the subject Wednesday night.
There are also issues to be worked out with getting building supplies into the island, and assessing just how much work local contractors were able to handle. Mr. Tibbetts said it was probably likely that Grand Cayman companies would have to be called in to help with the effort.
Options such as buying materials in bulk, rather than government bidding out each project were being discussed, but no final decisions had been made.
Mr. Tibbetts also said no ruling had been made on the amount of funding Cayman might receive from the Caribbean Catastrophic Risk Insurance Facility, a World Bank administered fund that government started paying US $2 million in premiums into last year. He said he expected to hear something soon.
Total damage estimates have not been compiled for Cayman Brac and Little Cayman yet, but Mr. Tibbetts estimated repair costs would be ‘ballpark’ $15 million to $20 million on Thursday.
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