Preparing for Hurricane Season? Start with a Barrel

The next few months are when people often rush to grocery shops and hardware stores to stock up on goods. The bill adds up fast during a time when everyone is watching where every dollar is going.

This morning on the Open Your Eyes morning show, Chief Hydrologist Tenille Hendy offered a simpler, cheaper priority that often gets overlooked during hurricane season: water.

“You can’t go without water for more than three days if you want to remain at the same hydration level that you should,” Hendy said. The solution, she says, does not require a significant expense. It requires what most Belizean households already have access to or can get for a few dollars.

“Growing up, you have what we call a ‘pigtail bucket’, your lard bucket. You wash it out with soap powder and Clorox and make sure it’s clean. When hurricane time is coming and you hear from the Met Service, you start filling up your buckets,” she added. “This is one thing that you can prepare for before that will alleviate some of the burden.”

She said doing the same with barrels does the same for larger storage of water. “People get the barrel, clean it out, put them outside, put a little mesh netting, we call it a cheese cloth. Catch the water, drop your Clorox in there, that’s water,” Hendy added. “It doesn’t have to come from the tap. And when we do that, we reduce the pressures on the water supply systems.”

A measured amount of Clorox, or water purification tablets available from the Ministry of Health and Wellness, is enough to make that water safe to use when the main supply is compromised by the debris-filled, turbid water that floods into river systems after a storm.

But storm aftermath is not the only threat to the water supply during the next few months. Belize can experience serious flooding without a single drop of rain falling in-country, a phenomenon Henday says is called “transboundary flooding.”

“Our borders don’t stop at the borders,” Hendy explained. “Belize country might not be getting the rainfall, but we have Mexico getting excessive amounts of rainfall, Guatemala getting excessive amounts, and that runoff channels into the river system and floods us.”

It is a direct reason why water preparedness cannot wait for a storm to be bearing down on the coast. Flooding in Benque, for example, has historically caught residents off guard precisely because the rain fell elsewhere, Hendy explained.