Last year, I had the amazing opportunity to work with many other volunteers in a large post-disaster recovery operation. The disaster itself was a major event which affected a significant proportion of a town and its residents in northern Canada. My role was to assist in the early days of the recovery effort once the situation had been stabilised and attention could be focussed on the longer term.
I’ll probably write more about my experience as I found it quite fascinating and it has led me to do quite a bit of thinking about disaster response in general. However, in this posting, I want to focus on the power of deployable volunteers which are available to large and active humanitarian organisations. In essence, the organisation I was with assisted from the very first hours of the initial response work and became deeply involved in the ongoing delivery of recovery assistance.
Until this experience, I’d always been a firm believer in the concept of having primary responsibility for disaster management located at the local level with locals heavily involved in the development, management and implementation of DEM capabilities. I was an equally strong believer in the virtues of the trained local volunteer base: awareness of the local sensitivities/needs/politics/players/priorities etc. However, what was hammered home with crystal clarity is the inadequacy of the model when confronted by anything lasting more than a few days and affecting more than a few people.
As part of my studies, we spent a fair amount of discussing the differences between an emergency, disaster and catastrophe. As a simplified (and simplistic) rule-of-thumb and with apologies to my academic mentors:
- an emergency is something one can handle with one’s own resources (e.g., a small fire on your stove and you reach for your kitchen fire-extinguisher – you do have one, right?);
- a disaster requires assistance from outside agencies (e.g., your extinguisher is empty and the house starts burning but is put out by the local fire-department);
- a catastrophe is a disaster writ large and will, by definition, overwhelm all available resources (e.g., Hurricane Katrina or the Japanese earthquake, tsunami and melt-down).
I think having your own, local volunteer cadre to respond to emergencies is fine. One does, however, need a very hard-nosed assessment of the capabilities and capacity of your cadre. And then one needs to determine the point at which the local cadre will become overwhelmed. In other words: when does your emergency become your disaster?
What struck me in my deployment is the power arising from possession of a national cadre of trained volunteers. I was, literally, serving alongside people from coast-to-coast (Sadly, I missed the 3rd coast by a matter of days.) who had been flown in for 2-3 week deployments to replace the local volunteers who had worked themselves into the ground before our arrival and were, effectively, hors de combat.
2011 was the most disaster-laden year I can remember in Canada and, at one point, we had all four western provinces simultaneously declaring disasters. The organisation I was serving with had people deployed in all four western provinces (and others further east) and was still able to supply the necessary feet on the ground. It was only able to do this because of its size and ability to deploy large numbers of trained people across the country from unaffected areas. I do not believe this combination of scale, dispersal and deployment capabilities can ever be matched by a local or, even, regional, authority.
As I look at BC’s ESS, I am deeply grateful for the volunteers staffing it. However, I have serious questions about the advisability of the local authorities being left to run it. All too often, I fear that ESS ends up being run from the corner of some overworked soul’s desk. Thus, it is left to languish under-resourced and underfunded by small and cash-strapped local authorities who, with the best will in the world, lack the time, money and knowledge to properly train and manage their volunteers. Assuming there are the volunteers in the first place. I think back to my days as a member of an ESS team with about 6/7 core members with nominal responsibility for an area with >140,000 people in it – a rate of ~20,000/volunteer. I remain profoundly grateful we never had to deal with a disaster as we were significantly outnumbered…
This entry is proving far longer than I planned. So, in summary, my thoughts/suggestions are as follows.
At the local level:
- Develop your local EM capacity as much as possible.
- Have a solid understanding of the emergency-to-disaster transition zone.
- Establish good relations with geographically far-flung EM counterparts.
- As much as possible, develop plans for rapid deployment of “foreigners” to your local emergencies and disasters. And be prepared to reciprocate.
At the Provincial and Federal levels:
- Ensure commonality as far as possible in your EM theory and praxis.
- Prepare for and practice deployment of volunteers across provinces: delegating that responsibility to local authorities is a cop out. Alternatively, outsource the deployment and movement of volunteers to organisations that already have that capability.