 In the 2010s, St. Lucia was hit by two major weather events, 2010s Hurricane Tomas and 2013s Christmas Eve trough. In 2014, to address the subsequent damage and increase St. Lucia's resilience to extreme weather events and climate change, the government of St. Lucia joined forces with the World Bank Group to create the DVRP. DVRP stands for Disaster Vulnerability Reduction Project. It is one of St. Lucia's largest collaborative projects with a donor-funded agency comprising of 126 major activities. Civil works all over the island are an integral facet of the DVRP. One of those civil works activities includes construction of a new PI bridge in the south of the island. The new bridge is approximately 1.6 meters higher than the original bridge was and that is to provide greater protection against rising water levels which is what affected the last bridge. So this bridge is expected to be a much more resilient to environmental impact than the original bridge was. OB Sadu Engineering was the contractor selected for the project while DVRP sought the services of Argentinian engineering firm AC&A to manage the PI bridge project. This project is a good project that is taking care of what's happened in the old bridge. The bridge saw extensive damage all the way back in 1994 during tropical storm Debbie and again after the 2013's Christmas Eve trough. Designed to accommodate extensive flooding and withstand extreme weather events the structure will include two lanes and a sidewalk. The project is the construction of a composite bridge which is a steel frame with a concrete deck. The bridge is a 25 meter long double lane bridge which is supposed to replace the single lane or bayly bridge that has been existing in that location for a while. Another component of the project is the rehabilitation of the area after the project which is not just the bridge the road alignments after the bridge etc it is also the environmental rehabilitation and we've done some of the riprap that you may notice that is supposed to be extended to ensure proper flow within the river and also the replanting of the area is also part of the project in that we're not just taking out the trees that we took out we're looking to transform the entire area into a more leisurely environmental sort of setting. Aside from infrastructural damage Hurricane Tomas and the Christmas Eve trough caused severe damage to St. Lucia's rivers. Three year over two million eastern Caribbean dollars is spent to desilt rivers across St. Lucia. A long term solution was sought which led to an initiative called the assessment of major rivers and the rehabilitation. The assessment of rehabilitation of major rivers was identified as an activity by the Department of Forestry. This led to the design of a pilot nature based restoration intervention of the five rivers bioengineering and agroforestry solutions will follow the assessments. The five rivers are the Fodor, Trumase, Marquis, Caldysak and shock rivers. So the assessments that are happening now and we would have hired or contracted an international firm CBCL you know out of Canada. CBCL is a Canadian bioengineering firm the company has significant experience in nature based river restoration. So we're a multi-disciplined full-sweep engineering environmental services company really providing engineering services for all different services throughout. Designs for the interventions will be based on detailed river and watershed assessments. These watersheds has been critical to providing water for St. Lucia. We had a geophysicist so essentially a geologist and so they were looking at the large-scale geology of the island looking at the different aspects of what the geology is. This is the current status of the rivers with respect to the level of degradation of the river banks, the current conditions in terms of the hydrology. One of the issues that happens along the rivers is not only do the rivers move and meander and there's a natural process of erosion but there's also a human impact to the rivers that could be land use whether it's farming or commercial or people allowing cattle and stuff to graze down to the river. Is there homes being built along them? Based on the assessment, CBCL has indicated a variety of recommendations. We started to look at different methods that could be used as kind of proven bioengineering techniques to stabilize the river banks and bioengineering is essentially using plants and vegetation and natural type of sources materials to help stabilize the banks. So this may include anything from planting trees, grasses and other vegetation sometimes in specific patterns and specific designs and layouts in order to stabilize river banks. We've also looked at the hydraulic model of all these different watersheds in the northern portion of the island so that from that we basically build a 3D terrain within modeling software and we basically model the watersheds to represent what's going on during these various storm events. So a lot of that data would have been used to set the stage for the rehabilitation plan using that data. This would be used to inform the designs for the bioengineering methods that would be recommended along these rivers. Stakeholder consultations played a major role on the rehabilitation plans. That is stakeholder consultation of government agencies and residents. The process would reduce the need for the silting rivers every year and ultimately reduce the risk of flooding in all vulnerable communities. In 2022, the DVRP facilitated two training exercises for first responders, disaster management staff and community leaders. We wanted to equip them with tools and more knowledge on how to assess damages after an event, after a disaster, how to assess damages, how to not just physical damages but also human need. The two training exercises were the damage assessment and need analysis or DNA and the community emergency response teams or CERT. Our main facilitator for the course was Mr. Earl Arthur's. Brigadier General Retired Earl Arthur's is the Training Institute Manager for Regional Security System or RSS. He is also the regional consultant for training and operations. He knows his stuff so it was very informative. As the name suggests in Dana, participants were trained in the initial assessment of damage after a natural disaster. That one focused on getting community volunteers and the local people, the different agencies within St. Lucia to be able to conduct damage assessment and we're talking more about the IDA, which is the initial damage assessment. What are your plans? What do you do? Who are the persons that you contact? Teach them how to interview the resident because it's the needs analysis, it's damage assessment and needs analysis and the needs part comes from the needs of the people. Three days of training included eight training modules, covered topics such as data gathering, analysis and interpretation of needs and the measurement of event impact. We made it very practical in that we didn't have damage houses for them to go and assess. So I have put together like about 70 pictures of damage houses. The suits training program was also conducted by Mr. Arthur's. When you deal with cert, the community emergency response teams, it's now different in that we are teaching them to be first respondents, but they are not going to be expert first respondents. We have the fire and the police and all these people who are and the medical ambulance people are first respondents for real. But we know that in the community, these people are going to be the first ones to meet the casualty, to go and search for people, to do different things before the authorities show. Two weeks after Dana ended, the trough happened in Corrine and Rosalie, who were impacted and these were the individuals that went out to do the damage assessment. And for us, it was a proud moment because while you teach, while they were training you inform them that okay, you will be called upon to assist in terms of disaster, most time that opportunity never comes or you never wanted to come because you really do not want a disaster to happen. But it was amazing to see the amount of persons who showed up the following day at our office, who had just been trained, volunteering to be part of the individuals who went out to do the assessment. I saw at least about 50 of those people actively engaged going out doing the assessment, coming back to Nemo and I recognized them and see them in the Nemo and I asked them how is it going and they said, going well, I'm glad I did that training.