NIA CHARLESTOWN NEVIS July 27, 2020 (Nevis Island Administration) – Hon. Troy Liburd, Junior Minister of Education in the Nevis Island Administration (NIA), has given the assurance that plans to make schools on the island COVID-19 complaint in time to open for the 2020-2021 school year, are well advanced.
Acknowledging increased inquiries from parents regarding the reopening of schools, Minister Liburd explained that the Ministry of Education on Nevis has been working with Education officials at the Federal level to put new COVID-19 protocols in place for primary and secondary schools.
Giving an update during a July 23, 2020 town hall meeting in Cotton Ground, hosted by the NIA, Mr. Liburd said the ministry is working assiduously to make sure schools will be in a position to open.
“We are preparing for the opening of our primary schools and high schools in September. The Ministry of Education is working in collaboration with the Ministry on St. Kitts to ensure that all of our schools in the Federation will be in a position to open come September. It would mean that some retrofitting would have to be done on our schools, and protocols would have to be developed. As a matter of fact, both ministries are working on protocols. We have seen a draft copy of the protocols that we are trying to put in place in both St. Kitts and Nevis.
“We are working together to see what would be the best fit for us to move forward; so there is quite a bit that’s going on behind the scenes to try to get schools up to standard to re-open in September in this era of COVID-19,” he said.
He stressed the importance of schools’ having proper sanitisation and social distancing protocols in place to ensure that students can go back to physical learning and do so in a safe environment.
A COVID-19 Compliance and Enforcement checklist has already been established for Early Childhood Development Centres on Nevis. It has been distributed to service providers, in order to have preschools and daycare centres meet the new standards to re-open in short order.
]]>NIA CHARLESTOWN NEVIS July 27, 2020 (Nevis Island Administration) – Minister of Information and Community Development, Hon. Eric Evelyn is pleased with the turn out to the July 23, 2020 town hall meeting in Cotton Ground, hosted by the Nevis Island Administration (NIA).
Minister Evelyn said the town hall meeting, the first of five in a series dubbed “Conversations with the People,” was an opportunity to dialogue with residents and provide them with an avenue to interact with their government representatives in a personal setting.
“I think it was a great first meeting. I was very heartened at the attendance at the Cotton Ground Community Centre. I think the presentations were well received and the residents asked a lot of questions.
“We feel it is incumbent on us as a government to come out to the public every now and then to give the people an indication of what we’ve been doing as an administration. It is important for us to come into the community and to touch base with residents, and I was impressed that we had almost a full house. That was very encouraging,” he told the Department of Information.
Mr. Evelyn said he was especially enthused by the number of young persons from St. Thomas’ who attended the meeting and the level of their participation.
“The young people not only came out, they had a quite a bit of interaction between the ministers. I think this new excitement we are seeing from the younger residents signals a new beginning for the parish of St. Thomas’,” he said.
Residents attending the meeting asked about road rehabilitation for some areas in the parish; plans for young entrepreneurs and training for young people; lighting for the basketball court and repairs needed for a retaining wall at the Cotton Ground Playfield; and the government’s plans to get people back to work.
The second town hall meeting is scheduled for Thursday, July 30, 2020 at the Franklyn Browne Community Centre in Mount Lily.
Hon. Evelyn invited residents in the St. James’ parish to attend and ask their questions and make recommendations. He said it is important for citizens to know that even though the elections are over, they can be assured that they still have the attention and support of the NIA.
]]>NIA CHARLESTOWN NEVIS July 23, 2020 (Nevis Island Administration) — Mr. Gilroy Putie, General Manager of the Nevis Electricity Company Limited (NEVLEC), says Nevisians are benefiting from a more reliable electricity supply.
Mr. Pultie, who recently spoke with the Department of Information on the strides the company has made in the past year, noted that moving forward the expectations are for an even higher rate of reliability.
“Reliability in my mind is at a fairly high-level right now. Yes, there is room for improvement but it is quite good…I believe the plans that we’ve had, plans that we have started to roll out over the next year, two years, at the most, I think the reliability of the supply in Nevis is going to be on par or better than a lot of islands in the region because we already getting close to that…and customers are already enjoying the benefits of our more reliable supply.
“They can expect it to be even more reliable, and even with a small storm the system is going to be a lot more resilient, the level of damage is going to be less and we would be able to restore much more quickly than maybe a few years ago. So, our customers have already begun to see the benefits of this but they can expect to see a lot more over the next year to two years,” he said.
The NEVLEC GM stated that the workers had embraced the challenge to better the electricity supply on the island.
“The guys have responded well. The guys have worked hard and we have achieved a lot and you can see the results of it.
“The work that we have been doing to improve the reliability on the transmission and distribution side is in two different areas. We first of all decided to improve the redundancy in the grid, and what that means is to provide more possibilities of feeding an area from different sources,” he said.
Prior to 2019 in most areas on Nevis there was only one possibility of feeding electricity to the area. Mr. Pultie explained that if they were required to work on the system in one area many customers would be without electricity. That situation proved to be a challenging one for the company and they set out to rectify the matter.
“We decided because the system needed to be reinforced, there is a lot of work that needed to be done on the system, we did not want to be taking outages that affect so many customers at one time, and so we built some redundancy into the system…We are putting a number of switches on the line so that we can isolate a much smaller area,” he said.
The NEVLEC GM gave examples of the work done so far to improve reliability of the electricity supply.
“We were able to provide a connection to the Cotton Ground feeder from the Charlestown feeder so the line that goes into the town and feeds the town that ended in the town at one time, we were able to create a ring to tie it back to the Cotton Ground feeder, and that tie is done around the section of the by-pass road and the main road.
“If a vehicle were to crash into a pole, on the by-pass road in the vicinity of the Artisan Village, at one time everybody would have been out, from Prospect to Camps for six hours, to replace the pole. If that were to happen now, we would be able to isolate that problem to between [St. Kitts -Nevis] Observer and just before the Island Main Road, and we would be able to feed up to The Observer from the very Cotton Ground feeder, and the rest of the areas from the by-pass all the way up to Camps we would be able to import from the Charlestown 1 feeder which we have connected to it, and the upper part of it we would be able to take from Gingerland via the West Coast and so that was the first prong of our efforts at improving reliability,” he said.
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