Red Cross Blogs

Logistics of disaster relief – part two

By Sarah Oughton
October 29, 2009 at 11:57 am

Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, the British Red Cross is ready to respond to disasters around the world.

As well as my full-time job as international writer, I’m a fully trained member of our logistics emergency response unit (ERU). This means each year I spend a month on-call, bags packed ready to fly out to a disaster anywhere in the world to help distribute emergency relief.

This summer, I spent a week in a muddy field taking part in a simulated-emergency. Everybody on the ERU roster does this once a year to make sure our skills are kept up-to-date.

One afternoon as the rain battered down on our tent (yes that’s what you can hear in the interview – it’s not just a bad quality recording!) I took some time out to catch up with Ina Bluemel, one of our most experienced delegates. Listen to the podcast and find out about flying into a hurricane and living on adrenaline.

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You can also listen to the  first in this series of podcasts exploring the role of our emergency response unit here.

Transcript for logistics of emergency response part two:

Sarah Oughton: Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, the British Red Cross is ready to respond to disasters around the world. The organisation has two specialist emergency response units – one that provides support in logistics, the other in mass sanitation.

I’m Sarah Oughton and I’m talking to Ina Bluemel – one of our ERU delegates – who has worked in many disasters in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.

SO: Can you tell me about being on call for the ERU? How does that work and how often are you on call?

IB: Well I’m on call a couple of times a year. For me it literally means that I’m at home and have my things packed, my phone in my pocket the whole time, ready to deploy as soon as something happens. We theoretically talk about six hours but I’ve already had the experience that I’ve been given three hours, so it is situation dependent. Anything between a couple of hours or a couple of days between the first phone call and actually sitting in a plane going out to a disaster has all happened.

SO: So can you tell me about one of the deployments you’ve been on?

IB: With the logistics ERU I’ve been deployed to Turks & Caicos Islands in the Hurricane Ike and Hannah last year. We flew out after Hannah and before Ike.

SO: So how did you feel flying out because that’s quite an unusual situation in that you were actually flying into a hurricane, usually you arrive after the disaster, but you were flying in as it was happening as it were?

IB: I think there was no room for panic or fear or concerns. I just knew that I wanted to get there as quickly as possible because I knew that the people have already been hit by Hannah and were in urgent need of people who can support them.

SO: And can you describe me the situation when you arrived on the ground?

IB: Well people had already gathered in shelters because we arrived literally 20 hours before the second hurricane came in. So having learnt from Hannah, people were already on alert and a lot more flexible as to leave the houses and go into hibernation, for the vivid experience was still there. So we joined the national disaster response team of the TCI government and together with the Red Cross colleagues that have been on the ground, the branch people, we’ve just tried to fine tune a little bit looking into evacuation procedures in case we get struck, then just live through the hurricane.

Turks and Caicos was a bit tricky because we normally work closely together with other emergency response units and you can imagine that the hurricane has put a lot of people at distress, houses have been destroyed and they were lacking the means to compensate for the losses instantly. So normally you would have someone with adequate knowledge to assess their needs and inform us as logisticians what would be needed, and then we would be arranging for those items to be transported and make sure they receive, they get distributed, they get handed over to the relief team that would arrange for the distribution. But as the situation wasn’t perceived as bad as it turned out to be after two hurricanes we were seeing a lot of damage and needs. We actually had to compensate for the lack of relief ERU which made us do two jobs; assessing the needs, deciding with the beneficiaries of the local branch what we would purchase to support and then purchase and arrange for the transport. That was pretty challenging.

SO: So can you tell me a bit more about other disasters that you’ve been involved in and how you’ve helped in the emergency response?

IB: On the logistics side, I’ve covered the Cyclone Nargis and the Turks and Caicos Island’s situation with the hurricanes. We also covered with the mass sanitation ERU lately the floods in Namibia, the cholera response in Zimbabwe and the big earthquake in 2008 in China.

SO: Can you tell me a bit more about the mass sanitation ERU? What does it mean, what does that involve?

IB: The mass sanitation emergency response unit covers the needs that are related to hygiene related diseases. It covers two components, which are the hardware component – building latrines, making sure there is drainage, it can go as bad as supporting body disposal, and then there’s hygiene promotion, which aims at increased understanding of the appropriate behaviour in an emergency.

SO: You must see some pretty distressing situations, how do you cope with that?

IB: It’s pretty simple for me, if I can not go I get very stressed, if I can go that is a big relief for me. So being able to contribute is what keeps me wanting to do it. What I see affects me on several levels, but I have a good family structure, I go to the beach a lot, I make sure that it’s balanced, sometimes it’s tough. But as I said, I live off the fact that I can go and contribute and I find it difficult not to.

SO: Does anybody stick in your mind, any of the people you’ve helped in Zimbabwe or other deployments?

IB: It’s my general impression of the volunteerism of the Red Cross that always touches me. It’s amazing, I keep meeting people who do this from the bottom of their heart without ever requesting anything back. And coming from a professional point of view where I earn my living with this I have a different angle to them and I sometimes envy their motivation over mine. It always gets me when I see someone like Andrew, a volunteer in Zimbabwe who just puts his support over everything else, he just kept on prioritising the needs of the people in his area. That I find quite amazing.

SO: What for you is the best thing about working on the ERU?

IB: I know my stuff and I like working with the confidence that I understand the system. I can push for things, I can push very hard and that’s what I love doing. It’s the fact that I can plan something today and I turn it into good tomorrow, might even turn it into good today. I get punished if I make mistakes straight away but I also get rewarded if I do it right very quickly.

SO: Is it a very stressful environment to work in?

IB: Oh yes. It’s stressful, but the stressfulness is something that has you on adrenaline most of the time so you don’t realise in the first couple of weeks that you’re actually working 20-hour days. So it is stressful but it is challenging and fun.

SO: For further information visit redcross.org.uk/eru and to find out more about the recruitment process email: recruitment@redcross.org.uk

Image © Sho Huang/IFRC

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Tags: Africa, Asia, caribbean, disaster, emergency, emergency response unit, ERU, ERU podcasts, logistics

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