Information for disaster management

On the morning of 26 December 2004, Vijayakumar Gunasekaran tuned into the morning news in his home in Singapore – in time to hear reports of an enormous wave engulfing the north-western shores of the Indonesian island of Sumatra. As the scale of the catastrophe sank in, he began to fear for his family in the fishing village of Nallavadu, on India’s Tamil Nadu coast. He reached for the phone and called his sister, telling her of the wave and urging her to evacuate: “Run out and shout the warning to others,” he said. She dashed outside and grabbed a couple of villagers, who broke into the community centre which housed a public address system, normally used to announce sea conditions to fishermen. They broadcast the warning to evacuate just in time. The tsunami destroyed 150 houses and 200 boats in Nallavadu, but all 3,630 inhabitants escaped with their lives. Early warning is the clearest example of how information can save lives in the face of disasters. But information is also a vital, and often neglected, resource for vulnerable people after the event. When people have lost their livelihoods, their homes, their friends and family to disaster, they are often desperate for some form of certainty. Accurate information on the fate of loved ones, on where to go for official assistance, or on the relief and recovery plans of aid organisations can be more important to traumatized survivors than material aid. While international aid organisations devote increasing amounts of time and money to keep donors updated on project implementation, communication with beneficiaries is often neglected. And while millions of dollars are spent airlifting relief aid into disaster zones, precious few resources are expended delivering vital information to those who need it most. Although the tsunami may have been a one in 200 year event, many other kinds of disaster are becoming more recurrent, affecting ever more people. However, the good news is that deaths from natural disasters have more than halved since the 1970s. And although the total number of people killed each year by natural disasters has averaged around 80,000 since the 1980s, average deaths per reported disaster have declined steadily over the same period. One key reason is better disaster preparedness and early warning – in which the provision of accurate, timely information plays a central role. Bangladesh provides an excellent example. During the 1990s, Bangladesh was lashed by five enormous cyclones. Up to 140,000 people died, most of them during one storm in 1991. But over 2.5 million people were evacuated – and their lives almost certainly saved – before the cyclones struck. This was largely due to the cyclone preparedness programme (CPP) initiated in the early 1970s by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), The Bangladesh Red Crescent Society (BDRCS) and the government of Bangladesh. The CPP was set up after a cyclone in November 1970 killed around 500,000 people. Its warning system uses Asia’s largest radio network, linking the CPP’s Dhaka headquarters with 143 radio stations. Storm warnings based on satellite tracking in the Bay of Bengal are relayed by radio to 33,000 village-based volunteers, who convey the message to vulnerable communities using hand operated sirens or simply shouting the warning by megaphone from speeding motorbikes. The CPP can now alert around eight million people across the whole coastal region. The volunteers are also trained to rescue people, evacuate them to one of 1,600 custom-built cyclone shelters, administer first aid and assist in post-disaster damage assessment and relief. Between disasters, volunteers organize simulation exercises and disaster-awareness rallies, often attended by several thousand people at a time. Two key factors lie behind the success of the Bangladesh cyclone preparedness programme: - The system’s capacity to get life-saving information the ‘final mile’, to reach those at greatest risk in time for them to take preventive action. - Continual public awareness-raising, year in year out, which enables even illiterate community members to interpret warnings and understand how to react under pressure. Following disaster, aid organisations are quick to pour material relief into crisis zones. Food, blankets, hygiene kits, mobile health posts are all rapidly flown in. But the need for information as a form of disaster response in its own right is often neglected. One of the most urgent priorities for disaster survivors is to discover the fate of their loved ones. In the first few weeks after the tsunami, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) co-operated with National Red Cross Societies in Indonesia and Sri Lanka to restore over 5,000 family links, through satellite phone calls and “I Am Alive” messages. Mobile teams visited affected districts to register thousands of survivors and missing people. These names were listed in newspapers, on posters and on a dedicated website – to enable family and friends to trace one another. Many myths circulate after disasters – often causing unnecessary suffering. One of the most pervasive is the myth that dead bodies spread disease. In Aceh, the Indonesian province devastated by December 2004’s tsunami, this myth was propagated by both the government and the media. As a result, thousands of Acehnese victims were hastily tossed into mass graves, to the great distress of surviving family members seeking a decent burial for their loved ones. And on a more practical level, the lack of a death certificate makes claiming official compensation more complicated. The World Health Organization has emphasized that the body’s germs die within a few hours of their host – and that live bodies are more likely to spread disease. According to WHO, mass graves are a “violation of the human rights of the surviving family members”. Another myth among traditional societies hit by the tsunami was that the wave was sent as a divine punishment for something wrong that they had done. In Sri Lanka’s Kalutara district, the Belgian Red Cross countered this myth by gathering villagers together and explaining through sketches the science behind the tsunami. “It is very important to provide people with accurate information”, said the organisation’s Sylvaine Courbière: “This can help the person cope with the disaster and understand that it is not his or her fault”. Disasters often expose the social and economic faultlines that run through human society. The more powerful members of a community are usually the first to access information and resources both before and after disaster. Claiming official compensation may depend on what or who you know. In parts of India affected by the tsunami, some of the poorest, lowest caste dalit communities had no idea what official compensation they were entitled to. A number of post-tsunami evaluations have found that aid organizations scramble to gather information on which to base their own emergency responses in the immediate aftermath of disaster – but few take the time to report back to beneficiaries. One review of the aid response in Aceh six weeks after the tsunami, conducted by McCluskey and Choudhury for the Joint Quality and Accountability Initiative representing the Sphere Project, the Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action and others, found that there had been “no consistent consultation with beneficiaries (and)… there appeared to be no formal (and very limited informal) feedback mechanisms.” As a result, aid agencies lacked sufficient feedback about the views of communities and in several cases, the failure to gather even ‘mission- critical’ information led to very poor aid delivery, “including reports of large-scale food distributions containing serious nutritional imbalances, and many reports of expensive water purification and supply equipment being inappropriate, underutilised or defunct.” Evidence from India shows that civil society, rather than the international system, is leading the way in exchanging information with disaster-affected people. After the 2001 earthquake in Gujarat, a local network of organizations, Abhiyan, set up centres to share information with affected people and aid agencies about needs and appropriate responses. When the tsunami struck Tamil Nadu, Abhiyan helped a group of NGOs set up a similar network, known as the Nagapattinam NGO coordination cell. The cell’s volunteers would visit 100 disaster-affected villages each day to establish people’s needs and key concerns. They would collate this information centrally and present it to the state government and aid agencies to help guide their responses. Information on aid interventions was fed back to the villages on a daily basis. In order to ensure aid is appropriate, it’s important to get accurate information from disaster-affected people on what they need and want. This means better consultation with survivors in the immediate aftermath of disaster. It also means informing prospective donors – especially well-meaning individuals – of what not to send. After the tsunami struck, well-meaning individuals and organizations donated huge quantities of used clothes, many of which were unacceptable or inappropriate for local needs. In Sri Lanka, donations of winter clothes prompted one senior government official to remark: “Maybe they thought Sri Lanka was on the South Pole!” Many of the clothes piled up on street corners, blocking roads, wasting the precious time of municipal workers who had to shift them, and taking up storage space. In Nagapattinam district alone, there were enough clothes to fill a large warehouse. Investing more time and resources into two-way communication with vulnerable people is one of the greatest and most neglected challenges for disaster management organisations. Such a process may challenge the “business as usual”, supply-led approach to emergency response. People won’t always say what agencies want to hear. Parvita, for example, a tsunami-affected widow from Villapurum district, Tamil Nadu said to one aid worker three weeks after the catastrophe: “I don’t want to see another cooking pot – I have as many as I will ever need. I want to know where my family is going to be living in one month’s time!” It’s often been said that knowledge is power. Giving vulnerable people the right information at the right time is a form of empowerment. It enables people to make the decisions most appropriate for themselves and their families – both before and after disaster strikes. It can mean the difference between being a victim or a survivor. For complete article

User comments

There are no comments

 Printable version