Red Cross Blogs

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I think I’m probably in the same boat as most people when I say that starting a new job can be a wee bit daunting. But for most of us on our first day in a new job we’re unlikely to be faced with the mammoth challenge of ensuring your nation recovers from its most devastating disaster in half a century – so spare a thought for Sebastián Piñera as he begins his new job as president of Chile.

It’s been almost two weeks since the earthquake and tsunami in Chile and there have been more than 200 subsequent aftershocks which continue to shake damaged buildings and infrastructure.

The number of people thought to have died has been fluctuating but government figures from 7 March report the loss of 528 lives.

Although the Chilean government has restored electricity and water in many regions, the people in the hardest hit areas are still facing big challenges to get access to these basic services. The reopening of some of the country’s main thoroughfares has begun in a government-sponsored effort to ensure connections between regions.

The Chilean Red Cross has been responding to the emergency since day one. Volunteers and staff, with support from other Red Cross National Societies, such as Spain and Japan, are active in the hardest hit regions of Maule and Biobío.

Initial assessments to identify the humanitarian needs show that health services, emergency and transitional shelter, and water and sanitation continue to be high priorities.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies has launched an appeal for £8.5 million to help people recover over the next year. This includes:

•    emergency supplies for 75,000 people
•    water and sanitation for up to 10,000 households
•    emergency and/or transitional shelter for 50,000 people
•    preventative community-based health care for at least 90,000 people.

So far, the British Red Cross appeal has raised £165,000 and the money is being used to support the Chilean Red Cross emergency response operation.

Images © IFRC

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Tags: Chile, Chilean Red Cross, disaster, earthquake, emergency response, Health and social care, shelter, tsunami, water and sanitation

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I was at a dinner party in Copenhagen when I heard about the earthquake in Chile. After my initial disbelief and shock that another huge disaster was happening so soon after Haiti I  immediately wanted to jump on a computer and do my job, which involves writing all the copy for our website when we launch an appeal.

But I was on holiday and it would have been a bit rude to abandon my friend’s party and despite my itching fingers I knew my colleagues would have the appeal covered.

Instead, I stayed and enjoyed my dinner and fielded a whole host of questions from my friends about how the Red Cross works. One of them had donated to the Red Cross after the Haiti quake and she wanted to find out what I knew about the situation and how effective I thought the Red Cross was in responding to disasters.

So – and feel free to accuse me of having fallen for the party line pretty much hook, line and sinker here – I set about explaining that what makes the Red Cross really unique when it comes to responding to disasters is that it is the biggest humanitarian organisation in the world with a Red Cross National Society in 186 countries. And since there are 196 countries in the world it means there’s rarely going to be a disaster where the Red Cross is not already present and able to respond. Call me a Red Cross geek, but I’m pretty impressed by that.

So it’s not surprising that, in Haiti, it was stunned local Red Cross workers who were some of the first to get the message out.

When I got to the office the morning after the quake, I already had emails with reports from Red Cross people in Port-au-Prince. And throughout the day the picture began to unfold. They said that amid crying and wailing, people were spending the night outside, frightened of further aftershocks. But even as they comforted people in the streets and treated the injured, it was clear they knew surviving the quake would be just the beginning of the ordeal. Their message was clear: we need help, send everything you’ve got.

We’ve all seen the extensive media coverage of this catastrophic disaster – a city completely decimated and millions of lives devastated. International assistance has poured into Port-au-Prince, but a few reports have implied that the response is chaotic with aid agencies being competitive and uncoordinated.

And it’s true that it is a crazy chaotic situation. But there are two sides to every story.

What I want to explain is that amidst the chaos there is in fact a systematic approach to provide the most effective and timely help possible.

There are more than 700 aid agencies currently working in Haiti, and to ensure the operation is as effective as possible, the United Nations is co-ordinating the response through its ‘cluster system’.

This works by bringing agencies into a ‘cluster’ according to the sector in which they specialise. For example, the World Health Organisation co-ordinates agencies specialising in health and the World Food Programme leads on logistics. The only cluster not co-ordinated by a UN organisation is shelter, which is led by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

Each cluster of agencies works to ensure efforts are not being duplicated and gaps are being filled. Unicef – who leads on water, sanitation and hygiene – has brought together the main agencies working in this field and divided up Port-au-Prince. Each district is assigned an aid agency lead, who co-ordinates the response in that area.

I know there are some frustrations that aid isn’t getting out to everyone fast enough and that’s understandable, but disasters on this scale can’t be sorted out within a few weeks. What’s important initially is search and rescue, providing medical aid then basic food and water – in that order.

And as I explained at the dinner party last weekend, I think search and rescue teams did a good job and it’s only after this that the pressing needs of helping people restart household living can be started, so people can cook their own food and have a tarpaulin to rig up shelter. It’s all important but it comes next.

Right now, we are focusing on sanitation and shelter. We need to innovate to meet the huge needs. Water and sanitation teams are currently doing a phenomenal job and the Red Cross is now distributing clean drinking water to 320,000 people a day. We have also distributed shelter materials to thousands of people.

The rainy season has already started and the hurricane season is due in a couple of months. Sanitation conditions are a high concern. With rain and poor sanitation there’s a very real risk of cholera, diarrhoea and malarial increase.

Having blurted all this out over dinner, I eventually shut up realising I may have ‘over-shared’.

But then one of my friends piped up with another question, ‘But what about Chile? If there are all these needs in Haiti what will happen to the people in Chile?’

It’s true that there is a massive response in Haiti with more than 600 Red Cross workers. But as a global organisation we still have many more resources to draw on to help people in Chile.

Whenever a natural disaster happens, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies co-ordinates the emergency response of all 186 Red Cross National Societies from around the world.

I know that many of the Red Cross National Societies in Latin America have already offered assistance and the Spanish Red Cross has deployed its basic health care unit. You can find out more on the Federation’s website.

You can also donate to our appeal for Chile on our website.

Images © Claudia Janke/BRC

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Tags: aid, Chile, clusters, co-ordination, disaster, earthquake, emergency aid, Haiti, shelter, UN, water and sanitation

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Ever feel that there are never enough hours in the day? Whenever a major disaster happens, like the Chile earthquake, it certainly heightens that feeling for me and I imagine even more so for those responding on the ground, working round the clock, carrying out search and rescue and providing first aid.

But I was really surprised when a colleague told me that earthquakes literally do shorten the day. The New Scientist explains how big earthquakes can shift the earth’s axis and as a result shave microseconds off the day – it looks like Chile’s quake will have had an effect of 1.26 microseconds and the Indian Ocean tsunami is said to have taken 6.8 microseconds off each day.

On Wednesday, I wrote about how the impact of the earthquake in Chile, which measured 8.8 on the Richter scale, differed from the 7.3 magnitude quake which hit Haiti last month. And after reading another article by the New Scientist I found out why the tsunami resulting from Chile’s devastating quake didn’t have as far reaching and catastrophic an impact as the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 which killed more than 230,000 people. This was to do with it being a comparatively small section (350 km) of the fault which ruptured during Chile’s quake as opposed to a much longer section (1,600 km) during the earthquake which resulted in the Boxing Day tsunami in the Indian Ocean.

However, this is not to say Chile’s quake was not devastating. On Tuesday, an aerial assessment conducted by the Red Cross showed massive damage, in particular to small to medium-sized towns with a large proportion of adobe/mud buildings. For example, the city of Talca, which has a population of 250,000, is almost completely destroyed.

The death toll in Chile is currently around 800 people, about 500 are injured and thousands have been made homeless – in Concepcion alone (Chile’s second largest city) it’s reported 500,000 are homeless. We are appealing for funds to support the Chilean Red Cross which is assessing the damage and needs, distributing emergency relief non-food items, providing first aid and psycho-social support and restoring family links.

Aftershocks are still being felt, and many people are sleeping outdoors or constructing temporary shelters due to fears of buildings collapsing. There is significant damage to roads, bridges and other infrastructure, which is hampering efforts to get aid to some regions.

Communications and access to affected areas remains difficult. Food, water and fuel are scarce, however supplies are beginning to arrive.

Please support our appeal which will help fund the Red Cross work in Chile for the next six months. This includes helping 75,000 people with distributions of emergency relief items, providing shelter and supporting emergency health, water, sanitation and hygiene promotion.

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Tags: Chile, earthquake, Emergency Appeal

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Cathy Ayer is part of a British Red Cross team in Haiti helping improve sanitation for earthquake survivors. She sent back this story on some of the more unusual ways they’ve found to make toilets fun.

Clowns. Funny guys that fall over a lot. Baggy pants. Little tricycles. Honking. More likely to be found in a circus than a camp for earthquake affected people. That was my experience of clowns until this morning when I attended a Red Cross hygiene promotion session in Automeca camp in Port Au Prince.

Automeca camp is currently home to approximately 10,000 people, densely populated in the centre of town with ramshshackle shelters squeezed tightly together. The British Red Cross sanitation team has been working in this camp for over 4 weeks for people made homeless by the earthquake. We have erected latrines and hand washing facilities so that people now have a safe and secure place to go to the loo. We have also undertaken a large hygiene promotion campaign with the residents of the camp. Hygiene promotion is all about delivering essential messages on how to maintain good hygiene to keep you and your family healthy, such as correct use of latrines, hand washing and storage of water. These things are absolutely vital…but is talking about going to the toilet sexy?

This is why hygiene promoters have to be extremely creative. They have to get the key messages out in such a way that it is interesting, engaging, clear, easily understood and makes people want to tell their friends and practice good hygiene. Today I saw Red Cross volunteers conducting a hygiene promotion session using glitter on people’s hands to demonstrate how harmful bacteria can be spread from person to person if they don’t wash their hands. They taught the people songs about why hygiene is good and everyone joined in singing and clapping their hands!

I then wandered over in to the centre of Automeca camp for the main attraction…the clowns! Liz, our hygiene promoter had found a group of local, professional performers, living in another camp in Port Au Prince, who have a clown act and she asked if they would join us to speak to the people in Automeca to promote hygiene. I was not sure what to expect…red noses? make up? Twirling bow ties? Instead I found something much more hilarious. A young guy dressed as an old man complete with white beard, an old man dressed as a baby (man size nappy included) and a scruffy clown with comedy breeches.

Hundreds of people gathered to see what was going to happen with these odd individuals. They had a loud speaker, and the girls in the group explained to the audience that they were here with the Red Cross to give them important information on health and hygiene, then the guys launched in to their fast paced comedy Creole routine. The “baby clown” spoke in a high pitched baby voice and had the crowd in hysterical laughter! The old man scolded the baby for not knowing how to use a latrine properly and instead invited the audience to contribute ideas on how it should be done properly. Members of the audience were pulled in to the act and everyone participated in agreeing what was good hygiene and what wasn’t.

Empowering people with the knowledge to keep themselves healthy in very difficult circumstances in these camps is very rewarding but what really touched me was the reaction of the kids to the clowns. Thousands of kids live in these camps across Haiti. Many will have lost parents and guardians, all are vulnerable and the trauma they experienced during the earthquake and since is hard to imagine. A group of hygiene promoting clowns is not going to take away all that trauma but if they can make them smile and laugh and perhaps forget their situation for a short time, it is a wonderful thing.

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Tags: emergency response, emergency response unit, ERU, Haiti, Haiti earthquake, haiti earthquake appeal, latrines, sanitation, toilets, water and sanitation

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Working for an emergency organisation you are of course always aware that sooner or later another disaster is going to happen. But when I heard last weekend about the earthquake in Chile – a country prone to quakes – my initial reaction was disbelief that it was happening again so quickly after Haiti.

The earthquake which struck Chile measured 8.8 on the Richter scale – I knew that that was huge and I held my breath waiting for the news of the devastation to unfold. Later I found out that it is actually one of the ten largest earthquakes ever recorded and it’s the worst disaster in Chile for 50 years.

The British Red Cross immediately released £50,000 from its Disaster Fund to help people in Chile and on Sunday we launched the Chile Earthquake Appeal.

In Haiti, the quake measured 7.3 on the Richter scale and more than 230,000 people are reported to have died. So far, reports on Chile say around 700 people have died.

The scale of both of these disasters is horrifying and for those involved of course numbers and stats mean nothing – it’s about the fact that they’ve lost loved ones, or homes, or jobs, or possibly all these things. And we desperately need your donations to help people recover both in Chile and Haiti.

However, the emergency response to these disasters will be different from each other. Strangely, although the earthquake in Chile is reported to have been about 100 times stronger than the one in Haiti (I don’t quite understand the maths/science behind all this but if you want to know then check out an explanation of the Richter scale on Wikipedia), it looks like it has had a less devastating impact in terms of lives lost and damage to infrastructure.

This is partly because the earthquake in Haiti happened almost directly under its capital Port-au-Prince, where almost three million people live, whereas in Chile, it’s second largest city Concepcion, which has a population of around 650,000, was around 90 km from the epicentre of the quake and it’s capital Santiago, around 350 km away.

Another major factor is that Chile is much wealthier than Haiti, it is far better prepared for disasters and has more earthquake resistant buildings. Haiti, however, has a long history of political turmoil, it is the poorest country in the Americas and its economy and infrastructure was already weak – when the quake struck it was inevitable that its buildings would collapse like a stack of pancakes.

So despite the quake in Haiti being of lesser magnitude, its impact has been far more catastrophic and has resulted in the biggest emergency response operation by the Red Cross in its 150 year history.

It’s not to say there aren’t major needs in Chile right now, however, the Chilean government was not badly affected by the quake and is providing strong leadership in co-ordinating the response.

The Chilean Red Cross is a member of the National Commission for Civil Protection in Chile, the body set up to co-ordinate disaster relief responses between government and other agencies.

It has staff and volunteers who have a lot of experience in responding to disasters and they have been on the ground helping survivors since the quake struck.

Today, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies launched an appeal to raise around £4.3 million, which will be used to support the Chilean Red Cross in helping 75,000 people recover from the quake.

Because the Chilean Red Cross is coping well, it’s unlikely that the British Red Cross will be deploying any delegates. However, we still really need to raise as much money as possible to support their work in delivering aid and supporting thousands of families who have been devastated by this disaster.

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Tags: Chile, disaster, earthquake, emergency aid, Haiti, Richter scale

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