Michael Den Tandt.
Urge to help is noble, but world needs better disaster response
It is gratifying, to be sure, to see the Canadian military’s Disaster Assistance Response Team wheeled promptly into action in the international effort to prevent Nepal’s catastrophic earthquake, its worst in eight decades, from becoming an even more devastating humanitarian calamity. Canadians rightly want to help, and want Ottawa to be seen to help.
If only global disaster response generally, encompassing the well-meaning efforts of governments, militaries and private agencies the world over, Canada’s included, weren’t such a shambolic, chaotic, wholly inadequate mess.
To watch the response to Saturday’s Nepal quake, which measured 7.8 on the Richter scale and has left a country already desperately poor in ruins — with many thousands dead, thousands more hurt and half a million homeless — is to see coming into focus an agonizing, slow-motion replay of the Haiti earthquake response in 2010. Only this time, if anything, it will be worse.
As in Haiti, transportation in Nepal even before the earthquake was basic. But unlike Haiti, Nepal is landlocked. This makes large-scale shipment of aid impossible. And the state of the one international airport at Kathmandu is unclear. Even if large transport aircraft such as those now en route from Canada are able to land, there’s no reason to believe the unspooling of aid to where it is needed will proceed any more quickly than it did in Haiti, where it took days, weeks and months.
If there isn’t already, then there will soon be a bottleneck in Kathmandu, as there was in Port-au-Prince, with private aid teams and aircraft from around the world queued up like dominoes at the airfield, waiting to move.
Delays will be exacerbated by the logistical difficulties presented by Nepal’s geography. Across most of the country there are no roads, even before the earthquake. Many villages are accessible only on foot. The country is all cliffs, ravines and valleys, every path punctuated by steep staircases, meaning even all-terrain-vehicles are of limited use. The very qualities that make Nepal a mecca for hikers and climbers make it impossible to service in a disaster.
The paved road between Kathmandu and Pokhara, Nepal’s western centre and second city, was a harrowing, narrow cliff-side marvel of engineering pre-earthquake, and reportedly is impassable now. There are small airstrips in Pokhara, Jomsom and Manang in the western Annapurna region, and Lukla in the east, toward Mount Everest, which should be accessible to military aircraft that can land and take off in short distances. Helicopters, more than any other conveyance, will save lives.
Here again the challenge will be co-ordination. Given the haphazard way in which an international relief effort of this kind comes together, particularly in a developing country with no effective central control, it is impossible for there not to be major overlaps and gaps. With each passing day the casualties due to lack of emergency medical care will mount. At higher altitudes, exposure to the intense cold will take a toll. And then will come the wave of water-borne disease, as people with no other option drink fouled water to stay alive.
The patchwork of private disaster-relief agencies is both a testament to the best in human nature and the shortness of our attention spans. The Red Cross, Médecins Sans Frontières, Global Medic, World Vision, Save the Children and many others have teams either in Nepal or en route. The Canadian government has established a Nepal Earthquake Relief Fund, private donor contributions to be matched dollar-for-dollar by Ottawa until May 25, which it will disburse to aid agencies it deems worthy.
The reality, however, is that the deliverers are effectively competing with one another for donor money, particularly during the days immediately following a disaster, when international media coverage is at its peak. As coverage wanes, donations drop off — so there is a rush, again with mainly noble intentions, to be first on the ground, brand on display, to prompt the generosity that will pay for aid later, after fickle popular attention has moved on. This puts the agencies effectively at cross purposes, when they could be working more closely together.
The remedy? If it were obvious, or easy, it would already be happening. But surely the wealthier nations of the world, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or the G-20 or some combination thereof, should have the wherewithal to field a coordinated disaster response that would be global in scope, and equal to the task of getting there fast, with the lift capacity, emergency medicine, potable water and shelter that are the pillars of disaster relief.
NATO’s bulked-up Response Force, to comprise 30,000 troops, is primarily an answer to Russian aggression in Ukraine and the rise of ISIL in Iraq and Syria. But it is also expected to have some disaster-relief function. Perhaps it’s too idealistic to imagine a significant share of NATO’s vast military heft being deployed just to save lives. That doesn’t prevent a person wishing, though. National Post