25 Jan 2017

Stakeholders from different departments and members of the community including Dikgosi have been urged to work together to mitigate natural disasters in Chobe District by implementing the recently developed emergency plan.

Chobe District is more vulnerable to natural disasters such as floods due to high rainfalls, veldt fires because of the excessive heat and communicable animal diseases since the country shares the border with three countries.

However, the district disaster management committee is ready to manage the situation by working together with different stakeholders to meet each other half way.

As a result, an emergency operational plan was developed to keep all the departments and stakeholders alert in ways of mitigating disasters.

“Disasters are not planned for they just happen, but we decided to come up with an emergency operation plan for disasters,” said district performance improvement coordinator, Ms Seele Chabata.

The emergency operational plan includes contact details for every department to be contacted when disaster strikes to prevent delays and ensure that the correct structure was followed to avoid false alarms and unnecessary panic to the community.

She further advised members of the community to familiarise themselves with the district’s disaster profile and make-up, as about 80 per cent of the district consists of protected land, which includes Chobe

National Park and six forest reserves, commercial farms and wildlife management areas, making the district more vulnerable to wild veldt fires.

Commenting, Kgosi Lesoma Lesoma of Lesoma applauded volunteers and district teams for having all the equipment needed for putting out veld fires.

Kgosi Richard Mbanga of Mabele said people in their community are responsible for some of these veld fires but no arrests had been reported. He said roads had been ruined by floods and were still in a bad state.

Department of Forestry and Range Resources acting coordinator, Mr Tawana Maunganidze said they were running short of four wheel drive vehicles, adding that some individuals were arrested for human induced-fires.

Some of the residents cited the unavailability of transport as a challenge as it slowed response time and uncooperative communities when dealing with the police and investigators during veldt fires. BOPA