Launching a response

UN guidance documents provide information about the formal system that’s designed to alert the international community to an unfolding disaster and mobilise a response. But of course, the first indication of an unfolding disaster and the initial response begins locally and the international community often arrives later.

_{©Gideon Mendel/Corbis via Getty Images}

By their very nature, disasters are complex and evolving things, and the scale and evolution of the event can rarely be anticipated entirely accurately. The recollection below by the station manager of Radio Dilber in Charsadda in Pakistan, as the flooding began, illustrates some of the challenges faced in the early stages of the response.

Shehryar Shah…remembers the thousands of phone calls his team broadcast over the air from July 28 to alert the Pakistan Army as to where people were stranded. His news and talk station was virtually alone in covering the onset of the flooding as national media attention was fixated on a crash that same day of an Airblue passenger plane in the Margalla Hills, just north of Islamabad.

“We broadcasted these rescue cries for three days, and then we moved to the relief phase,” he said. One of his most painful memories involves a caller indicating that there were about 235 people stuck on rooftops in one part of town waiting for help, calling again and again when no one came. “After two or three hours, there was no more contact with them. Their cell phone was off,” Shah said, distraught. “But the government [was] still insisting just 69 dead in Charsadda.”

_{(Gronewold 2010)}

Your task

Read some of the initial situation reports published at the end of July 2010:

• Situation report by UN OCHA
• European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (ECHO) press release
• Preliminary report by the World Health Organisation (WHO)
• Information bulletin by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC)

How do agencies decide when and how to respond? Discuss this question in the comments area with your fellow learners.

Reference

_{Gronewold, N. (2010) ‘What Caused the Massive Flooding in Pakistan?’ Scientific American [online] 12 October. available from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-caused-the-massive-flooding-in-pakistan/ [28 April 2020]}