Red Cross Blogs

Never go on holiday!

By Pete Garratt
September 17, 2009 at 4:53 pm

We’ve all been there.  A lovely, hard earned break away from it all. You bounce into the office, healthy tan, all glowing, only to realise that it’s going to take you a month to catch up again.  A day later the tan has gone!  Well, it’s been like that for me too.  Straight back from hols into an Indonesia earthquake, several different tropical storms gathering in intensity, severe flooding in West Africa and exacerbated drought situations in Syria, Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya.

This might sound weird, but it ’s been a quiet year as mega disasters go.  It’s the odd thing about my job in that I’m busy because of an awful disaster somewhere; because people are suffering and in need of our help.  While I hate being quiet at work, actually, being quiet means people aren’t being hit by cyclones, earthquakes, drought and flood which is obviously where we’d like the world to be. 

I was asked yesterday what we did between disasters.  I think the person asking had a picture of us with our feet up watching news channels or polishing water buckets.  The sad reality is that there isn’t much time inbetween as the world continues to get hit by disasters that might not make the news or require the massive response of a Tsunami or Pakistan earthquake, but nonetheless cost lives, cause injuries, destroy homes and livelihoods, affecting a great many women, men and children.  The World Disaster Report has consistently highlighted the growing number of disasters and the numbers of those affected by them.   Perversely it’s what keep me in a job.

Apart from responding to these slightly smaller disasters, a great deal of preparation goes into making sure we are as well prepared as possible to mobilise support in terms of experienced people, appropriate material and equipment, and often simple cash.  This involves monitoring current or expected disasters – so yes, there is some news channel watching!  But also learning the lessons from previous disaster responses and feeding that back into improving future ones, making sure we’re as ready to go as possible and developing new and innovative ways of responding.

Last year we had the Myanmar cyclone, China earthquake and Caribbean hurricanes.  This year there’s been nothing comparable … yet!   As my experience coming back from holidays shows that doesn’t mean we’ve not been busy.

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Tags: disaster, drought, flooding, holidays

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