The National Disaster Management Agency (NaDMA) continues its preparation for the hosting of CARIBEWAVE 2019, carded for Thursday, 14 March 2019.
This year’s scenario is a first of its kind for the exercise. It will involve a simulated Eruption of Kick ’em Jenny at 10 am causing a 6.0 magnitude earthquake at a depth of 10 km which triggers a tsunami with waves of up to 0.86 m (2.8 ft).
The exercise will be held mainly in St Patrick but triggering a national response. The 2019 exercise gives Grenada a unique opportunity to test the SOP (Standard Operating Protocol) created in 2018 as part of a pilot Tsunami Ready Project launched in St Patrick. The exercise will be conducted simultaneously in Carriacou and Petite Martinique.
We encourage the general public to go onto the website tsunamizone.org to register for the exercise. So far the agency has already completed a number of meetings with stakeholders from the St Patrick community and also national stakeholders. In addition, direct community interactive sessions are ongoing, sensitising people of the exercise and expectations of them.
CARIBEWAVE (Caribbean Tsunami Warning Exercise) is a tsunami exercise held annually in the Caribbean, including Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, under the direction of UNESCO and the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre.
The purpose of the CARIBEWAVE exercise is to improve the effectiveness of the Tsunami Warning System along the Caribbean coast. The exercise provides an opportunity for emergency management organisations throughout the region to test their operational lines of communications, review their tsunami response procedures, and promote tsunami preparedness.
The objectives of the CARIBEWAVE Exercise are to test and evaluate the operations of the Caribbean Tsunami Warning System (Caribe EWS), to validate preparedness response to a tsunamis (which are test protocols and communications systems between tsunami warning centres and the tsunami warning focal points), and the use of the PTWC (Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre) enhanced tsunami products for the Caribbean, as well as assist in tsunami preparedness efforts of the emergency management agencies in those areas.
NaDMA, the official source for all disaster-related information in Grenada.
