Rebuilding Smarter in Jamaica

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1:17You're listening to State of the World from NPR. We bring you the day's most vital international stories up close where they're happening. It's Monday, December 1st. I'm Greg Dixon. Over a month ago, Hurricane Melissa slammed into Jamaica. It was a Category 5, one of the strongest storms ever to make landfall in the Atlantic. Scientists agree Melissa was made stronger by climate change. And now many Jamaicans are wondering how to rebuild for the reality that another powerful storm may hit in the future. NPR's Ader Peralta takes us to Jamaica. In rural West Mullen Parish, there's a tiny town in the hills where not a single house survived.

2:00Stefan Clark walks me to his place. That's my house here. Oh, man. Everything. It looks like a tornado ripped through here. Mature trees are snapped in half. The walls, the roofs of wooden houses look like a scattered deck of cards. Clark's friend, Alan Pedor, says the night of the hurricane, the wind sounded like a nightmare. Terror. Be a wind. Like the breeze was talking to you. Yeah, the breeze was like, get safety, go to safety, go to safety. The only thing the wind left of Clark's house is the concrete stoop. Yeah, this used to be the step right here. I come open my front door, go in. What did you build it out of?

2:47Board, it was board, yeah, board. Board is what they call wooden houses. But they had no choice. Concrete is expensive, and they were renting. Leonard Francis, the CEO of Jamaica's National Environment and Planning Agency, or NEPA, says that if everything in Jamaica were built to code, the island would have fared much better than it did. Resilience, he says, is not rocket science. The technology and the know-how is there. For example, scientists know that if you build a concrete roof, a structure can survive violent Category 5 winds. NEPA's models can tell you just how high a foundation should be raised to avoid the worst of a storm surge.

3:29But Jamaicans cut corners. You're supposed to put in, say, 100 hurricane straps and you put in 80. It makes a difference. Professor Michael Taylor, who studies climate change at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, says Jamaica was trying to prepare for this scenario. The country had paid off debt. It had saved for a disaster recovery fund. And it had invested in what's known as a catastrophe bond, essentially a$150 million insurance policy. Taylor says the problem is that all that preparation falls way short of the damage estimates. What we need to recognize is that none of them adds up yet to, and I'm going to use that number, a billion U.S.

4:10dollars. The conservative estimates that we are talking about are at$6 billion to$7 billion U.S. dollars. Jamaica's opposition leader, Mark Golding, says the big picture here is that Jamaica is suffering the consequences of a global problem. The greatest producers of greenhouse gases that have affected the climate have been the industrial nations, and they've been doing it for a couple of hundred years. In other words, Jamaica did not cause climate change. Instead, it's been responsible and tried to prepare, but the scale of the problem is so huge it cannot deal with it on its own. Golding says that's where countries like the United States have a responsibility to step up.

4:53The moral case for them, looking at how we who are suffering the effects of that are dealt with, I think it's manifest. It's self-evident, really. The question is whether they're prepared to take on that responsibility. The strongest part of Hurricane Melissa passed right over the town of White House. All of the wood structures collapsed. Tanisha Frankinson's house was basically unscathed. The staircase roof went, so we had leakage. Just a bit of water damage. In some ways, her house survived by chance. Jamaicans, she says, like to hear the rainfall in the evenings, so they tend to build wood roofs.

5:39But they had the intention of building a second story. But if you're going upstairs, then you are going to deck a part of it so you can go upstairs. A deck means a roof made of concrete and steel. Frankinson didn't build it to survive a hurricane. But it worked. So you'll find that now the general conversation is that everybody's going to deck. Even if they can't hear the rain, she says, they have no choice but to adapt. Ada Peralta, NPR News, in western Jamaica.

6:16That's the State of the World from NPR. Thanks for listening.