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17 May: Full Team Established - 26 maps produced to date. |
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Wednesday, 17 May 2006 |
The two elements of the team finally came together late on Tuesday
(16th) evening at the hotel, after the main party arrived in Suriname
on Tuesday.
After Nigel gave a short briefing to the new arrivals, David
accompanied Nigel to the Disaster Centre, while Sylvie, Hamish and
Chris settled into the hotel. At the Centre the MapAction space
is alongside the UN OSOCC in a separate room. The space allocated
in an air-conditioned room, shared with others, is proving a good
working environment and a particular boom to printer operations.
Today (Wednesday 17th) the team assembled at the Centre and began to
get down to work. Visitors came asking for maps, though not in
the quantities that we had experienced in previous major disasters
(this owing to the smaller numbers of NGOs in situ). The Surinamese
senior army officer in charge of the disaster relief effort visited the
MapAction cell and expressed his satisfaction at the contribution that
MapAction was making. MapAction comprised principally, at this
stage, Toby and Nigel; though most people here of course were/are
unaware of the considerable work done behind the scenes by the main
party en route, and other MapAction GIS specialists in the UK. About 26
maps have now been produced.
Our maps are on ReliefWeb , the UN portal on the Internet and have also
been sent to Alertnet, the humanitarian website of Reuters. Telecom
Sans Frontieres, who have a team here at the Centre, have asked for a
map showing humanitarian relief sites in the interior that possess
radio or satphone communications. Other maps show specific river lines
with the disaster situation depicted in a given region, and smaller
scale maps that show the overall situation. We have asked for
processed data from recent satellite imagery acquired under the
International Charter, which will come to us from our partners in
project Respond: UNOSAT and Sertit.
Nigel at time of writing is conducting an area assessment by
helicopter. He has taken his GPS and intends to take waypoints of
specific sites as well as track-log the flight route for reference
purposes. We are told that the Netherlands have a warship en
route for Suriname that will contribute several Lynx helicopters to aid
in relief efforts; they are due to arrive tomorrow.
We have been made very welcome and the Centre authorities are looking after the aid workers very well.
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Deployment Diary 
