PRIME Minister, Brigadier (Ret’d) Mark Phillips, on Tuesday, attended an inter-agency meeting convened at the Civil Defence Commission (CDC) headquarters on Thomas Road, as part of the ongoing After-Action Review of the multi-agency response to the MV Barima incident.
The session brought together senior representatives from the principal agencies that formed the backbone of the emergency response, including the Guyana Defence Force, the Guyana Police Force, the Civil Defence Commission, the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre, the Maritime Administration Department, regional authorities, and other government agencies involved in the operation.
The meeting served two central purposes: to conduct a thorough, inter-agency review of how the coordinated response to the MV Barima disaster was executed, and to identify concrete measures for strengthening the country’s national emergency preparedness framework going forward.
After-action reviews of this nature are a standard element of emergency management practice, allowing agencies that operated together in a crisis to jointly examine what worked well, where coordination gaps emerged, and how communication, resource deployment, and command structures can be improved for future incidents.
The Prime Minister’s continued personal involvement in this review process underscores the priority the government has placed on drawing lessons from the tragedy, both to support ongoing accountability efforts and to ensure Guyana’s emergency response systems are better equipped to handle similar incidents in the future.
The review comes as separate processes continue to run in parallel, including an international Commission of Inquiry into the disaster and criminal proceedings against individuals connected to the vessel’s operation, with authorities noting that this after-action process is focused specifically on strengthening institutional and operational preparedness rather than matters of individual culpability.