PICTURE THIS SCENE, familiar to every Caribbean resident: A hurricane or tropical storm is upon us. Within hours, schools announce midday closures, sending parents scrambling. Businesses release employees simultaneously. Roads transform into parking lots. Gas stations develop hour-long queues. Supermarkets become battlegrounds as shelves empty. Banks face runs. The cellular network crawls. Emergency services struggle to respond while preparing their own operations.
And the storm? We had warnings days ago! We’ve watched this chaos repeat for decades, accepting it as inevitable. Meteorologists issue warnings. Governments announce closures. Gridlock ensues. Infrastructure strains to breaking. The vulnerable suffer most.
Then the actual storm arrives, finding us already exhausted from the pre-storm pandemonium we created ourselves. Here’s the uncomfortable truth: We’re doing this wrong. The crisis before the storm isn’t the natural disaster – it’s self-inflicted catastrophe created by simultaneously shutting down entire territories in the final 24 to 36 hours before impact.
The cost of chaos we don’t calculate
When every business releases employees at the same time, productivity doesn’t just stop – it reverses. Workers spend hours in traffic instead of minutes. Fuel that could have lasted weeks burns in a single day of idling engines. Vehicle accidents spike. Businesses rush to secure property, paying premium prices for supplies suddenly scarce. The economic cost exceeds lost productivity – it includes waste, damage, and inefficiency created by our own panic.
But economics pale beside human cost. When roads gridlock with office workers rushing home, ambulances can’t reach emergencies. When supermarkets overflow with panic buyers, elderly residents and people with disabilities cannot navigate the crowds. When everyone withdraws cash simultaneously, ATMs empty before the vulnerable arrive. When schools dismiss suddenly, working parents without flexible schedules face impossible choices: lose pay, risk their job, or leave children vulnerable.
Emergency services designed to serve those in need instead spend critical hours managing chaos we created. Fire trucks navigate gridlock to reach accidents caused by rushed driving. Police manage disorder at overcrowded stores. Medical facilities treat injuries from hasty preparation. All while these services need to prepare their own operations for the approaching storm. The concentrated chaos created by simultaneous closure doesn’t just inconvenience – it endangers the most vulnerable when they need protection most.
The organisations that don’t panic
Yet some organisations barely miss a beat. Companies with remote work infrastructure shift seamlessly to distributed operations days before storms arrive. Schools with online learning platforms transition students calmly to remote instruction. Government agencies with cloud systems continue delivering essential services. These organisations don’t just maintain operations – they contribute to rather than detract from community resilience.
When a school based on
the best available forecasts, can announce days ahead that classes will shift online, there’s no mad rush to gates, no traffic chaos, no terrified children waiting for parents stuck in gridlock. When companies activate remote protocols as storms enter forecast range, employees transition to home offices over several days.
Roads remain passable. Gas stations serve customers without hour-long queues because demand spreads over time. Workers prepare homes methodically – securing shutters, buying supplies, checking on elderly neighbours – rather than rushing through preparations after finally reaching home through traffic.
The contrast couldn’t be starker. Traditional closure creates synchronised crisis: everyone needs the same resources at the same moment, travels the same routes simultaneously, makes preparations in compressed timeframes. Remote capacity enables graduated transition: distributed operations over days, systematic preparation, manageable infrastructure load instead of crisis-level surge.
What we’re really talking about
Building remote capacity isn’t about trendy workplace flexibility or keeping up with global corporate culture.
It’s about choosing order over chaos, proactive preparation over reactive scrambling, systematic transition over simultaneous shut down. It’s about protecting infrastructure by distributing demand over time rather than concentrating it in crisis moments. It’s about enabling emergency services to serve the vulnerable rather than manage crowded roads and stores. It’s about ensuring the days before a storm strengthen rather than exhaust community resilience.
Yes, this requires investment – in telecommunications infrastructure, backup power systems, devices for students, training for teachers and employees, subsidised internet for low-income households. But this investment is far less than the accumulated cost of continued chaos. The infrastructure pressure, the emergency service strain, the risk to vulnerable populations, the economic waste – these costs compound the damage from storms themselves.
The choice ahead
Hurricane season is never far away in the Caribbean. The current approach – waiting until storm arrival seems imminent, then shutting down entire territories simultaneously – creates predictable crisis before the weather even deteriorates. The storms will come – they always do. The question is whether we’ll face them having already exhausted ourselves through chaos we created, or whether we’ll approach them prepared, calm, and resilient. The choice is ours.
Professor Justin Robinson is Pro Vice-Chancellor and Principal, University of the West Indies Five Islands Campus.
