2 I n the 2020 edition of the Hurricane Season Horizon Newsletter we said: The COVID-19 crisis continues to unfold as the 2020 hurricane season has begun. This is unchartered territory for all of our members states. The development of a storm or hurricane that could pose a direct threat would be a cause for great concern in the COVID-19 context. We are all relieved that although the 2020 Atlantic Hurricane Season had 30 named storms, there was no widespread devastation and damage among CARICAD member states as there was in 2017. Experts have again predicted that the 2021 hurricane season will be above average in terms of level of activity. Significant progress has been made in controlling the spread of the COVID-19 virus in many Caribbean countries. There were no vaccinations in 2020 because the vaccines were not yet available. However the vaccination campaigns in 2021 have been laudable. There is some anxiety arising yet again because of an apparent “third wave” of COVID-19 infections not only in some extra-regional environments but also among some CARICAD member states at the time of production of this newsletter (May 2021). La Soufriere volcano in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. The explosive eruption took place in early April 2021. There have been ongoing events since that time. We reiterate our statement of intent from last year, adapted for this year. We have once again produced this special edition of CARICAD’s Horizon Newsletter to help the entire public sector in member states prepare for the 2021 hurricane season against the backdrop of the COVID-19 crisis. We have provided practical suggestions that we hope our public sector leaders/managers will embrace and implement. Devon Rowe, Executive Director CARICAD For this publication, we again utilised photographs such as this one provided by Father DeAngelo Bowe, Rector of the Holy Spirit Anglican Church in The Bahamas, which show the immense damage caused by Hurricane Dorian in 2019. We are aware that you might require more detailed and in some cases very specific information that you might not get here in this Horizon Newsletter. We hope that this newsletter will encourage you to get any additional information you need from authoritative sources. Please contact us and let us know if there is anything you think that we at the CARICAD Secretariat can do to help you prepare more effectively for this 2021 hurricane season. We have updated some of the articles we published last year because of their immutable relevance but we have added a significant number of new ones in this edition. What we have described above exists as a backdrop to a major explosive eruption of the On a final note, apart from researching the content and scripting the articles in this second special edition of the hurricane season newsletter, I am delighted that this year Programme Specialist Franklyn Michael has also shown us his creative side with the poem Facing the Force, which you can read on the page which follows.
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