Red Cross Blogs

Nature’s power unleashed!

By Pete Garratt
August 14, 2009 at 2:54 pm

If like me you’ve been following the television pictures of torrential rain, buildings collapsing and villages being swept away you’ll have been mesmerized by what nature can do. Typhoons, flooding, landslides, earthquakes (in Japan) – it’s been a tough week for many in East Asia caught up in these and an especially busy week for local Red Cross volunteers and staff as they’ve worked all hours to respond. We in Britain complain if we have more than a couple of inches of rain, Taiwan got – I kid you not – two and a half meters in two days!

We had been tracking typhoon Morakot since the middle of last week. We use a number of meteorological websites to do this; here’s a link to Tropical Storm Risk so you can see for yourself. At one point it looked like it would hit Taiwan as a category 4 – the second highest – and so we made contact with our regional Red Cross to understand their state of readiness. In the event Morakot weakened but as you’ve seen any type of typhoon can wreak havoc, this one causing the worst flooding in 50 years wiping out homes and causing a still mounting death toll.

On it rolled to China where the impressively prepared Chinese authorities had already evacuated one million people from at risk areas, assisted by the Red Cross – one struggles to imagine that we would be able to do the same in the UK!

People have expected me to be especially busy given these disasters, but as well as the scale of the impact and the needs of those affected we look at the capacities of the local authorities to respond. In these cases they have been reasonably strong, with the local Red Cross playing an important role in providing food, water, blankets and shelter. Therefore no international Red Cross support has been needed from the likes of the British Red Cross.

One thing we’ve been more actively involved in this week is the cholera outbreak in Nepal that I mentioned last week. We have had one of our staff diverted to work with the Nepal Red Cross in preparing their action plans to respond in distibruting water purification tablets and communicating key messages educating people in how to prevent cholera spreading. With this we made the decision to release £15,000 to support their work.  It might not sound like a big sum of money but will go a long way in helping prevent the spread of this potentially deadly disease.

I’m on holiday now for a couple of weeks - yes, even disaster responders get some time off – so stay safe and see you in September!

Image © BBC

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Tags: China, cholera, flooding, Nepal, Taiwan, typhoon

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