Red Cross Blogs

Disasters are like buses

By Pete Garratt
October 12, 2009 at 3:02 pm

You wait for ages and then three come along at one. What a couple weeks we’ve had. Typhoon, tsunami, earthquake and typhoon again. Yes, that’s four but our response to Typhoon Parma that hit the top of the Philippines was incorporated into the existing relief effort of the Red Cross from the earlier Typhoon Ketsana.

It’s been a frantic time for us, hence the relative silence from me on the blog front, as we’ve mobilised a logistics team to Indonesia to look after the enormous aid effort that the Red Cross is channelling in to meet the urgent needs of those affected by the devastating earthquake in Sumatra. We have emptied our regional warehouse in Kuala Lumpur to bring in emergency shelter, blankets, mosquito nets and more. We’ve also supported the Philippines response with hygiene kits and kitchen sets.

In addition to all that we’ve directed cash support to the operations on the ground in Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam and Samoa. Most other humanitarian agencies are focussing on the first three but the Red Cross has such a large global network of local Red Cross that our response in Samoa has been fairly large too. We’ve sent £170,000 and deployed an early recovery specialist to help restore livelihoods of those who suffered in the face of another tsunami. The images from Samoa struck a resonant cord with me with the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami still relatively fresh in my memory.

Typhoon Parma ended up hanging around northern Philippines for several days dumping huge quantities of rain on a part of the country that provides much of the country’s food crops. With increasing numbers of typhoons being one example of how climate change is affecting our world, you’ve got to feel for the people of the Philippines. Disaster events like these will increase the number of people in poverty both directly from the typhoon impact itself and indirectly from the resulting food shortages and high prices that are feared will follow.

In the meantime, there’s still more that the Red Cross wants to do to help those who need it most in these disasters. We have our Disasters Emergency Committee public appeal and the British Red Cross Samoa Tsunami Appeal open right now so that our great supporters can help us. Why not check these out on our website?

Image 1 © Wayne Ulrich (IFRC)

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Tags: disaster, disaster response, donations, earthquake, floods, Indonesia, natural diaster, Philippines, Samoa, tsunami, typhoon, Typhoon Ketsana, Vietnam

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 12th, 2009 at 3:02 pm and is filed under Emergencies, Fundraising and events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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