Red Cross Blogs

Logistics of disaster relief – part three

By Sarah Oughton
December 4, 2009 at 2:30 pm

Have you ever switched on the news to see the horror of the latest flood,

cyclone or earthquake and watching the gut-wrenching distress of people who have lost everything, wished you could go and help?

Of course, your boss might not be best pleased when you don’t turn up for work the next day and there are always reasons why you might not be able to drop everything and go. Yet this is exactly what the members of the British Red Cross emergency response unit do.

Listen to this interview with Carl Lindley and find out what it was like to arrive in Myanmar after the trail of destruction left by Cyclone Nargis in May 2008.

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This is the third in a series of podcasts exploring the role of our logistics emergency response unit and how it responds to international emergencies.

For more information you can also listen to the first and second podcasts.

Transcript

Sarah Oughton: Have you ever turned on the TV to see a major disaster, and watching the gut-wrenching distress of people who have lost everything, wished you could go and help?

Of course, there are always many reasons why you might not be able to drop everything and go – not least because you can’t just walk out on your job. Yet this is exactly what the members of the British Red Cross emergency response unit do.

I’m Sarah Oughton and I’m talking to Carl Lindley, who works full-time as a scientist at the Health and Safety Laboratory, but is also a member of our Logistics ERU.

How did you get involved with the British Red Cross emergency response unit?

Carl Lindley: I got involved in the British Red Cross ERU, because I was just leaving the air force after 30 years and I saw an advert in one of the military resettlement brochures about ERUs and logistics and wanting air ops and warehouse people. I’ve got 30 years of experience and thought it would be rather nice to give back, you know I’ve got all these years of training and experience, to actually give it back to something that’s worthwhile and it just went from there.

SO: So can you please explain how that works, as in you have a full-time job but you’re still on the British Red Cross ERU roster, how does that work in practice?

CL: Actually being on the ERU, what I do is I’ve agreed with my boss that he will let me off for up to one month a year, I notify that at the beginning of the year to the overseas part in the Red Cross and we agree a date a month that I can be on call. It’s nice that I’ve found an employer that will allow me to be on the roster and if I don’t get called out it’s no detriment, and if I do get called out it’s no detriment to them and it’s a benefit to me and also a benefit obviously to the Red Cross.

SO: And can you tell me have you been deployed yet?

CL: Yes, I was lucky or unfortunate to be deployed to Myanmar/Burma last year for the cyclone I did 28 days in-country doing air ops and sea ops.

SO: So can you describe more the situation when you arrived in Myanmar, what was happening?

CL: It was three weeks after the cyclone had hit, there were still people who hadn’t had any aid in the delta. Some had received some aid, various logistics hubs had been formed and they were in the process of building up their stocks so they could distribute them out to the locals and further afield.

When I got there the sea corridor had just been opened sufficiently because of the damage to the docks. When I initially arrived there we could only unload 10 and 20 foot containers, when I left we were being able to accept all container sizes up to 40 foot which obviously aided in the quantity of materials coming in.

The airport was fully functional although we did have a problem with large jets coming in – 747s – we had no loader to offload the upper decks so that all had to be undertaken by hand, which meant that the turn around was anything from six to 12 hours, depending on the items, just to unload one aircraft, so it was quite a lot of manual labour to undertake.

SO: What was the most challenging thing about the operation?

CL: The most challenging thing for me in the operation was not being able to go out and see exactly the distribution and how I could aid and perhaps make that better because of the restrictions on foreign nationals within Myanmar we were only allowed in the locality of Yangon city, but that also included Yangon international and the docks.

SO: And how did you feel at the end?

CL: I felt at the end of my tour in Myanmar, glad that I’d been there, been able to do something but also saddened that I hadn’t been able to go out to the delta and see if I could aid better distribution, logistics perhaps change a few procedures. The National Society in Myanmar is so strong, they only needed a few suggestions, because it’s a constant ongoing problem within the delta and the region these sort of activities that happen there. They’ve got a good background of disaster relief.

SO: So what would you say to people who are thinking of applying for the ERU roster?

CL:  I think anybody who’s thinking about applying for the ERU roster should apply anyway because it’s such a great feeling when you go out. If you’re the first team on the ground and you’re there in total devastation and people are running around not knowing what to do they’re all in shock and you turn up and within a week you can be there, you can see people, they’ve got shelter, they’ve got some sort of food, their life is getting better every day that you’re there and after your tour you can see a different, it may not be a lot of difference to you other than the fact that a few thousand people have got tent accommodation instead of a couple of tarpaulins or on the side of the road. But to them it makes such a difference in life and aids their recovery further on and I think that, it gives you a buzz just to go there and see from total devastation to people actually starting to live again and to go on and that’s really what it is about I think.

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

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Tags: Burma, cyclone, emergency response unit, ERU, ERU podcasts, logistics, Myanmar

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This entry was posted on Friday, December 4th, 2009 at 2:30 pm and is filed under Emergencies, Podcasts. 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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