Town and Country Planning Department officials are working on calculating a detailed estimate of the devastation Hurricane Irma caused to buildings throughout the territory.
It won’t be their first assessment: In the weeks immediately after the storm, the agency came up with an initial projection of overall structure damage that totaled nearly $900 million, according to Chief Planner Greg Adams.
“I can’t emphasise enough: That number was very preliminary,” Mr. Adams explained in an interview with the Beacon late last month. “Because, as you can imagine, in the time when we were doing it, access to a lot of baseline information was very limited, so we were doing the best we could with what information we had to arrive at some sense of what the magnitude of the damage was.”
Hence the second estimate: The chief planner and his team are in the midst of going house-to-house across the territory to calculate a more precise account of what the territory lost.
Why all the effort?
“It gives you a sense of what it is going to take to restore [the territory],” Mr. Adams explained. “So when you have proper methodology to document what the loss is, you can speak more intelligently to different donor agencies to say, ‘This is where we were, this is where we are now, and this is what we need to restore us.’”
Assessing loss
Many are familiar with the $3.6 billion figure tossed around by Premier Dr. Orlando Smith and other government officials when they talk about damage done to the territory.
Though Dr. Smith (R-at large) has been tight-lipped about how the number was derived, Mr. Adams said it was based on rough estimates of loss provided by leaders in about a dozen sectors across the Virgin Islands economy, including his agency’s $900 million building damage estimate.
The premier has quoted the $3.6 billion figure in numerous international meetings with potential donor countries and agencies, including last month’s United Nations “pledging” conference in New York.
There, more than 25 nations and funding agencies pledged $1.3 billion worth of grants and more than $1 billion in loans and debt relief to Caribbean countries and territories battered by the 2017 hurricane season.
A subsequent, more accurate, estimate of loss will also allow the Disaster Recovery Coordination Committee to spend the right amount of money in the right places, Mr. Adams explained.
In turn, that ability will likely increase potential donor confidence, the chief planner added.
Initial effort
In the weeks following Irma, TCP employee used six drones to take video of communities across Tortola, Virgin Gorda, Jost Van Dyke and Anegada.
“We would come back here and set up literally two screens: one showing the [drone] video and one with the map we have of all the buildings, and identifying buildings on the map and classifying them based on that,” Mr. Adams said.
The classification was broad: Buildings were assessed on a scale of one through four, with a one meaning the building was barely touched by the storm, a four meaning it was destroyed beyond repair, and twos and threes at incremental points in the middle, the chief planner explained.
Each number corresponded with a value derived from the TCP’s rough estimates for the average property value and cost of repairs.
Residential buildings assigned fours were considered $250,000 worth of loss, threes were $125,000, twos were $70,000-$80,000 and ones were about $20,000, according to Mr. Adams.
Assessments of commercial buildings were also rolled into the initial estimate, though they were compiled using a higher monetary scale, he added.
The drone video allowed assessors to quickly assign numbers to most of the buildings in the territory.
“Using that methodology, about 70 percent of the buildings we were able to identify in the BVI, territory-wide,” the chief planner explained. “Which, by any surveying means, that’s an enormous sample size. That’s almost your complete stock.”
From that 70 percent, they extrapolated the nearly $900 million figure for the whole VI, according to Mr. Adams.
In addition to the roughness of the estimate, the immediate-post-storm method had other shortcomings. A property damage assessment can provide the backbone for calculating the number of displaced people in the territory, but drone video doesn’t now allow for that. An overhead recording won’t reveal how many units are damaged in an apartment complex, for instance.
New estimate
TCP’s current assessment involves a lot more boots on the ground. Six teams of officials are now working their way through assessing the roughly 11,000 buildings on Tortola.
At a rate of about 300 buildings a day, the teams have finished some 8,000 as of last weekend. Mr. Adams expects the department to spend about two more weeks on Tortola and a week splitting up the sister islands, meaning they should be finished with the estimate by early January.
The numbers should help with more than just building damage calculations.
“What’s happening parallel to this is the Central Statistics Office is also doing some very detailed work in terms of the damage and loss assessment,” the chief planner said. “And we’re working very closely with them, feeding them building data. They’re the ones, for example, that give us the persons-per-household data that we could use in the determination of how many persons were displaced.”
A team from the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean is conducting an independent damage and loss assessment for the territory as well, he added.
Mr. Adams believes that matching up all of these different moving parts will help write the script for the VI’s recovery.
“Having a good sense of what those losses are is the starting point,” he said.
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