On July 4, while people in the United States were celebrating Independence Day, Jamaica was beginning its recovery from Hurricane Beryl. The Category 4 storm had not made direct landfall, yet it made digital and in-person communications nearly impossible, as almost all Jamaicans were without power and roads were covered in debris. Under these conditions, Sean Brissett—who manages the St. Elizabeth Parish Health Department in Jamaica—was understandably distraught. When our team arrived to assess the damage and provide emergency response services, Sean walked outside, saying “My clinics. They’re all gone,” then sat on the ground in silence. St. Elizabeth is one of Jamaica’s largest parishes, serving more than 150,000 residents. Without any means of contacting the 32 health districts Sean oversees, it was easy to imagine the worst.
Karol Bassim, International Medical Corps Emergency Response Unit (ERU) Senior Manager, describes the mood of the St. Elizabeth Health Department team during this time: “They felt helpless in a way—like, ‘Okay, there’s nothing we can do. We cannot move. There is no communication. There’s no electricity.’ So, it was very difficult for them to identify the needs.” Thankfully, local and international first responders were already at work, helping to clear the roads so that they could begin their assessments of Beryl’s impact. In the ensuing days, our team and Sean’s St. Elizabeth Parish staff reached three of the health clinics that endured the worst of Beryl’s high winds and heavy rains, and got a clear picture of the clinics’ status for the first time.
Although our team found that Beryl had rendered many health facilities nonfunctional, the assessment seemed to energize the local health workers. Once the response was underway, Karol says, it had a galvanizing effect on the Jamaican health staff. Sean and his team now understood the extent of the challenge, and knew they could respond. “The people needed to receive medical and health services,” Karol says. “Their usual clinics were closed, and it was going to create more pressure at the local hospital.” Immediately after the assessment, our ERU worked with the Jamaican Ministry of Health and Wellness (MoHW), the St. Elizabeth Health Department and other partners to distribute supplies and retrofit three community health centers to serve as temporary health clinics.
Jamaica’s National Healthcare Enhancement Foundation helped our team obtain information essential to our response, then issued tax exemptions and granted customs clearance so we could quickly procure vital construction materials to help repair the damaged health facilities. Karol says. “By providing those services, we help local communities prevent any outbreaks of disease—whether COVID or dengue fever,” Karol explains. “Now the community knows that they can visit these temporary health clinics for treatment.”
But response is not enough. As our team members were overseeing this work, they were thinking, “How do we prepare for the next disaster? How do we build resilience so we can respond better next time?”
Beyond the Initial Reports: The Heat Factor in Texas
The initial assessment after a disaster like Hurricane Beryl is crucial. These fact-finding missions help first responders understand the challenges that affected communities are facing and who needs assistance most urgently. “That’s what we do as an agency: We get on the ground first, because that’s when the need is the greatest,” says Susan Mangicaro, a seasoned nurse who has been providing lifesaving care in the aftermath of disasters since she worked in Haiti in response to the 2010 earthquake.
Sue was part of the International Medical Corps team responding to Hurricane Beryl in Texas, where the storm had weakened to a Category 1 by the time it made landfall. As with Jamaica, local health professionals initially had only a limited understanding of how the people, infrastructure and health facilities fared during the hurricane. “The visual assessment is so important,” Sue says. “The reports give a partial picture, but until you see firsthand how the community is actually doing, you cannot really prepare an effective response.”
When Sue visited local communities in Texas, she saw what was missing from some of the initial reports: “When you think about being in heat of that nature, without power, and losing everything that you have—when resources are limited to begin with—you start to really understand the secondary crisis within the crisis.”
Like many places in Beryl’s path, affected communities in Texas were left without power—for example, nearly 3 million homes and businesses in the Houston area initially had no electricity. In the days after Beryl, the heat index—a combined measurement of air temperature and humidity—was more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Though Beryl disrupted power for almost 60% of Jamaicans, temperatures on the island remained below 90 degrees during the worst of their power outage, so the threat from heat was relatively minor. Beryl was responsible for four deaths in Jamaica, but in Texas, the death toll was at least 36. Medical examiners in the Houston area attributed at least seven deaths to hyperthermia, a deadly condition that occurs when the body experiences heat beyond its ability to regulate, and many others due to storm-related complications, including heat.
A Collaborative Response to the Destruction
The Texan communities in Beryl’s path were already facing some harrowing challenges before the hurricane tore through their neighborhoods. Legacy Community Health, one of our local partners that has more than 50 clinics in the Houston area, says that more than 90% of their patients are below the poverty level. “In addition to their patient population not having power, 70% of Legacy’s staff didn’t have power either,” Sue says. Yet even as they dealt with challenges of their own, the health workers whom we partnered with in both Jamaica and Texas were resolute—they were going to continue providing care, despite any personal challenges they were facing.
Partners like Legacy and the St. Elizabeth Health Department are essential to an effective emergency response. “It’s important because they know the population better than we do. And they know the needs,” Sue says. The staff of these organizations are also key to local self-reliance: Our teams train them so that they can continue training their communities and prepare for the next emergency.
Much of Jamaica was caught off guard by Beryl, the strongest hurricane to hit the island nation since Gilbert in 1988. The experience appeared to provide focus and motivation, however. Karol found the MoHW and regional health teams to be exceptionally driven.
“They’re very quick and enthusiastic about solutions and how to move forward,” Karol says. “They’re looking for ways to become more resilient.” In the coming months, International Medical Corps will conduct Stop the Bleed and other emergency preparedness training sessions for health and non-health personnel in Jamaica. The Jamaican health system professionals “are happy that we also do capacity-building,” Karol continues. “Most of the support they’ve been receiving is in supplies and funding, but no one else approached them to provide training.”
International Medical Corps will continue to work closely with healthcare organizations serving under-resourced and at-risk communities, helping them to design and implement programming that equips community health centers and community members to better prepare for future emergencies. We will implement skills-based health center emergency management training for health center staff to strengthen the resilience of such centers in the face of increasingly destructive weather events so they can remain operational, meet urgent health needs and help keep their communities healthy as they recover.
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