Leonard Doyle
by Leonard Doyle
With banner headlines already decrying the slow pace of aid in the Philippines, there was palpable relief when, at a packed briefing for aid agencies, it was announced that piped water had been restored in Tacloban, the city brought to its knees by Typhoon Haiyan.
“By 3pm 150,000 people were getting water at home,” said Luiza Carvalho, the UN’s top official in the Philippines. “There are leaks in the pipes, but that’s the least of the problems. By Monday we hope to get 100 percent of the city’s nine municipalities with access to running, drinkable water.”
There was more good news about the stepped-up pace of relief thanks to a coalition of the willing that has pitched in. Canada, Britain, the US, Japan and Norway have already put ships, planes, helicopters and trucks at the disposal of the huge relief effort.
Nobody wishes to voice it openly, but looming over this mobilisation is the unhappy memory of post-earthquake Haiti. Four years ago next January, a noble ambition to “build back better”, coupled with an outpouring of generosity from ordinary people, somehow failed to transform a broken country. The generosity is in evidence once more for the Philippines: Britain’s Disasters Emergency Committee appeal has already topped £33m.
Those who have been working day and night to get food, shelter and other necessities into the hands of two million people made homeless by the disaster know it’s only a matter of time before some in the media shoot first and ask questions later. No humanitarian agency or international non-governmental organisation wishes to be in the cross-hairs of accusations of incompetence or mismanagement when lives are at stake.
Less than a week into the crisis, the strain of fighting against bottlenecks that refuse to budge is showing among veterans of relief operations. One after another they admitted that getting supplies on the ground was proving a challenge. There were the mile-long traffic jams as trucks waited to board overtaxed ferries. There were security incidents, real or exaggerated, that were causing delays and then there was the complicated geography of this beautiful archipelago, where transport links are not well, if at all, mapped.
In the early hours of yesterday a column of relief trucks from the International Organisation for Migration was arriving at ground zero of the typhoon’s most deadly landfalls, part of a supply chain to rival a small army’s. Fiendishly complicated logistics lie behind the first of many deliveries of more than 30,000 bedrolls and blankets, many thousands of plastic tarpaulins for families to create shelters, and thousands of corrugated-iron sheets to provide protection from the sun and rain.
Also aboard the trucks are simple kits to help families start cooking and washing hygienically. Then there is the debris clearance equipment, all on its way to Tacloban and other blasted cities, such as Roxas and Ormoc. And that’s just for openers.
One of the next steps is to get money into people’s hands, paying them to use local native materials, including lumber from fallen coconut trees, to start rebuilding their homes.
The ever-expanding pipeline bringing aid to areas devastated by the typhoon is being run by experienced logisticians. They are pulling together goods purchased and donations in kind from many different sources, so that when they are handed out, people can rebuild by themselves.
Before anything long-term can be achieved, individual families must be registered and their needs assessed. It often appears to be a slow-moving and overly cautious process, as the registration captures numerous details, including the location of each family. The process will be speeded up by allowing people to self-report, once the mobile phone networks are back up.
Volunteer groups will fan out across the country, recording the needs of the homeless and then feeding it back to databases for rapid analysis and the dispatch of aid to the most vulnerable.
Despite an exodus of desperate people from Tacloban, many residents are staying. They line up patiently every day for the packages of aid being delivered by a constellation of governments using military airlifts and, increasingly, trucks, coming in by land and sea. We are doing our best not to let them down.
The Guardian
by Leonard Doyle
With banner headlines already decrying the slow pace of aid in the Philippines, there was palpable relief when, at a packed briefing for aid agencies, it was announced that piped water had been restored in Tacloban, the city brought to its knees by Typhoon Haiyan.
“By 3pm 150,000 people were getting water at home,” said Luiza Carvalho, the UN’s top official in the Philippines. “There are leaks in the pipes, but that’s the least of the problems. By Monday we hope to get 100 percent of the city’s nine municipalities with access to running, drinkable water.”
There was more good news about the stepped-up pace of relief thanks to a coalition of the willing that has pitched in. Canada, Britain, the US, Japan and Norway have already put ships, planes, helicopters and trucks at the disposal of the huge relief effort.
Nobody wishes to voice it openly, but looming over this mobilisation is the unhappy memory of post-earthquake Haiti. Four years ago next January, a noble ambition to “build back better”, coupled with an outpouring of generosity from ordinary people, somehow failed to transform a broken country. The generosity is in evidence once more for the Philippines: Britain’s Disasters Emergency Committee appeal has already topped £33m.
Those who have been working day and night to get food, shelter and other necessities into the hands of two million people made homeless by the disaster know it’s only a matter of time before some in the media shoot first and ask questions later. No humanitarian agency or international non-governmental organisation wishes to be in the cross-hairs of accusations of incompetence or mismanagement when lives are at stake.
Less than a week into the crisis, the strain of fighting against bottlenecks that refuse to budge is showing among veterans of relief operations. One after another they admitted that getting supplies on the ground was proving a challenge. There were the mile-long traffic jams as trucks waited to board overtaxed ferries. There were security incidents, real or exaggerated, that were causing delays and then there was the complicated geography of this beautiful archipelago, where transport links are not well, if at all, mapped.
In the early hours of yesterday a column of relief trucks from the International Organisation for Migration was arriving at ground zero of the typhoon’s most deadly landfalls, part of a supply chain to rival a small army’s. Fiendishly complicated logistics lie behind the first of many deliveries of more than 30,000 bedrolls and blankets, many thousands of plastic tarpaulins for families to create shelters, and thousands of corrugated-iron sheets to provide protection from the sun and rain.
Also aboard the trucks are simple kits to help families start cooking and washing hygienically. Then there is the debris clearance equipment, all on its way to Tacloban and other blasted cities, such as Roxas and Ormoc. And that’s just for openers.
One of the next steps is to get money into people’s hands, paying them to use local native materials, including lumber from fallen coconut trees, to start rebuilding their homes.
The ever-expanding pipeline bringing aid to areas devastated by the typhoon is being run by experienced logisticians. They are pulling together goods purchased and donations in kind from many different sources, so that when they are handed out, people can rebuild by themselves.
Before anything long-term can be achieved, individual families must be registered and their needs assessed. It often appears to be a slow-moving and overly cautious process, as the registration captures numerous details, including the location of each family. The process will be speeded up by allowing people to self-report, once the mobile phone networks are back up.
Volunteer groups will fan out across the country, recording the needs of the homeless and then feeding it back to databases for rapid analysis and the dispatch of aid to the most vulnerable.
Despite an exodus of desperate people from Tacloban, many residents are staying. They line up patiently every day for the packages of aid being delivered by a constellation of governments using military airlifts and, increasingly, trucks, coming in by land and sea. We are doing our best not to let them down.
The Guardian
