Villagers concerned about safety following earthquake

GEORGETOWN (CMC):

Minister of Home Affairs Robeson Benn has sought to dispel the fears of residents in the South Rupununi who were considering abandoning their villages in the wake of the January 31 earthquake that was most pronounced in that area of the country.

Benn, a geologist by profession, visited the Katoonarib and Sawariwau villages over the weekend, accompanied by fellow geologist Leandro Pires, director general of the Civil Defence Commission (CDC), Lieutenant Colonel Kester Craig, and a CDC team.

Craig reported that as a result of the quake, two houses in Katoonarib were damaged, while there were several cracks in houses and government facilities in Sawariwau. The CDC team also observed cracks in the earth and three areas of sizable depressions in Katoonarib.

Rare Occurrence

However, Benn sought to assure the residents that earthquakes in that area were rare and there was no reason for people to leave.

“This is not necessary, and it will only cause enormous distress, dislocation and unnecessary expenditure. There is no need to leave your homesteads to go to any other place,” he told them during a community meeting in Katoonarib.

Benn also dismissed rumours that the shifting of the tectonic shift was caused by oil-extraction activities in Guyana’s maritime space.

“That is completely impossible. If that were the case, we would have lost the seawalls, the city of Georgetown, and everything would have been in the ocean already; not to happen all the way out here, some 700 miles in the Rupununi. It is totally unrelated, and I want to dispel those suggestions that it is related to oil extraction out on the coast or in the ocean.

“We have taken out much more volumes of pure water for drinking than we have for oil for those sediments going out there. So, those things are totally untenable in relation to these events,” he said.