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18 May: The Disaster Response Settles Down |
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Thursday, 18 May 2006 |
A flight over the stricken area brings home the scale of the flooding,
and the disaster response effort is now settling down into a series of
carefully planned operations.
Yesterday Nigel flew over the stricken area in a light aircraft (not a
helicopter as I reported earlier). He brought back an excellent plot
(by GPS) of villages along two rivers which recorded the amount of
flooding in each. Toby then produced a map of this situation, which
proved popular. Nigel was struck by the scale of the Marowijne river,
one of those principally affected by the floods. It is as big as the
Rhine and the waters flows were rapid and in many places dangerous for
canoes and small boats. There are falls and rapids all along it,
swollen by the flood waters, and it made for an impressive sight from
the air. There are many relatively shallow areas where only flat
bottomed canoes and small vessels can navigate, which of course,
affects relief efforts. Inevitably, owners of small boats are doing a
lucrative trade in renting out their vessels to aid workers and
government officials for the distribution of supplies.
Our main 'customer' is the operations centre of the national disaster
centre (in which we are located). The Surinamese army officer who
orchestrates the detailed co-ordination of operations visits the
mapping cell regularly and tasks us with producing maps for briefings
to ministers, media newshounds, and central coordinating meetings.
Liaison teams from the Brazilian army and Netherlands navy have
arrived, and have visited the mapping cell. In particular their pilots
were very keen on the air navigation maps we produced, and owing to the
pilots' late arrival, the MapAction team worked late to meet the
Netherlanders' requirements, and then we delivered the maps to the
hotel where the pilots were staying.
The disaster response effort is now settling down into a series of
carefully planned operations using the newly arrived aircraft. The Red
Cross & Red Crescent are doing excellent work, augmented by able
efforts from a small host of NGOS, principally local, and the
government machine has deployed troops and other government officials
and is directing and coordinating the operations. Humanitarian 'hubs'
(small co-coordinating teams deployed in-place at several key points)
have been established, and we have shown these on our maps.
Hydrographers have placed sensors in a number of selected points in
main river junctions, and are trying, inter alia, to correlate
rising/lowering of water levels with rainfall. Owing to the saturated
ground underneath much of the inundated areas, the water is not being
absorbed and heavy rain causes a lifting of the levels.
We met the Vice President of Suriname who came for a briefing in the
operations centre, and also met representatives from some of the big
donor organisations in the Caribbean region, such as Echo and the
European Commission, who were interested in our maps. David gave a
radio interview to Radio Netherlands, who were curious about MapAction
and our role.
It is probable that the team will pull out on Saturday, so we have been
trying to identify a successor organisation. Through Alan Mills we
have been in touch with a local GIS company and they have been invited
into the operations centre to show what they can do. If necessary,
Chris and Hamish have volunteered to stay a few days longer should it
prove useful to the aid effort.
The last diary entry will probably be tomorrow.
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Deployment Diary 
