THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
By JAMES HOOKWAY
(Post by CAAI News Media)
BANGKOK -- The natural disasters that have wreaked havoc across Southeast Asia and the South Pacific in recent days presented what could have been a logistical nightmare for aid agencies operating in the area.
Associated Press
Residents of the historic town of Hoi An, in central Vietnam, a Unesco World Heritage site, coped Thursday with flooding from Typhoon Ketsana.
But since the massive Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, organizations such as Save the Children, World Vision and Oxfam International have ramped up their disaster-response and prevention teams in the region, helping them respond more easily when calamities strike in more than one place at the same time.
Aid efforts could be put to the test again by another storm, Typhoon Parma, expected to hit the Philippines this weekend. Forecasters said Parma is already more powerful than its predecessor, Typhoon Ketsana, the Associated Press reported.
Typhoon Ketsana killed at least 386 people in the Philippines, Vietnam and Cambodia. At least 150 people died from the tsunami that hit Samoa, American Samoa and Tonga on Tuesday, and the toll was expected to rise as search efforts continued.
Rudolph von Bernuth, emergencies director at Save the Children, says 2004 was a turning point for how aid agencies organize themselves. Since then, Save the Children has built up warehouses in various locations in Indonesia, for instance, and trained hundreds of relief workers to better respond to the earthquakes and other disasters that frequently rock the country.
"We're not bringing in dozens of relief workers each time because we've built up the in-country response capacity," Mr. Von Bernuth said. "Maybe we only have to fly in two or three specialists to deal with areas such as communications. We've very consciously developed this since the 2004 tsunami in areas which are recurrently hit by disaster."
On Thursday, the agency began shipping emergency supplies to Padang by road from one of its warehouses in Medan, also on Sumatra, and flew in two staff to Padang to assess what help is required.
Oxfam, meanwhile, had deposited 5,000 tarpaulins and various sanitation supplies with its local relief partners in case a large quake struck the temblor-prone zone.
Humanitarian aid agency World Vision also dispatched a needs-assessment team to Padang within hours of the earthquake.
"Many buildings have collapsed, including a hospital," the agency's emergency communications officer Enda Balina said. "We're afraid many people are trapped inside the rubble."
James East, World Vision's Asia-Pacific communications director, said the organization has hundreds of trained staff, based in countries around the region, who are ready to respond to disasters in their own areas. In the Philippines last weekend, when Typhoon Ketsana dumped a month's worth of rain on Manila and the surrounding area in half a day, World Vision and other agencies were able to immediately begin distributing emergency food and water supplies.
A number of aid groups, such as the American Red Cross, set up options on their Web sites for donors to give for disasters in the region.
Some aid agencies, meanwhile, are adjusting their fund-raising strategies to suggest that global warming threatens further violent storms in vulnerable parts of the world. A number of relief organizations have specifically linked Typhoon Ketsana and similar storms to the dangers associated with climate change.
Mr. von Bernuth at Save the Children said this can be a useful tactic in soliciting donations from corporate donors, in particular. "We ask them, 'Do you have contingency plans to protect your business, especially from natural disasters?' Well that's what we're trying to do, too," he said.
The floods accompanying Typhoon Ketsana dominated a climate-change conference in Bangkok this week. Yvo de Boer, the United Nations' climate chief, likened the flood-affected countries of Southeast Asia to canaries in a mineshaft. "They're the ones that will be confronted by the impact of the climate change" if the world fails to secure a new climate change agreement in Copenhagen later this year, he said.
Others are wary of over-selling the possible climate-change connection, at least for now. The Philippines, for example, faces dozens of tropical storms each year, and flooding is a recurring problem in parts of Vietnam. "We don't explicitly link it," said Barry Coates, Oxfam's executive director for New Zealand. "A lot of the public can connect the dots for themselves."
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