The UN senior head of the coordination centre team departed tonight for Geneva and made a special effort to visit MapAction to thank personally each member of the team for our collective effort.  It was a nice gesture and his parting words were that he would like to see MapAction deployed whenever disaster struck, to assist relief operations. The UN coordination team is now deployed between several locations and tomorrow we shall be sending Jonathan and Anne to different 'humanitarian hubs' sited in two of the most affected towns. This is at the request of the UN coordinating teams in those locations who want help with mapping.  Jonathan and Anne have spent some time preparing suitable maps for their hubs which they shall take down with them.  Anne has also been asked to take a UN satphone for issue to her hub. The two of them will spend several hours on the ground, discussing the mapping information requirement with their respective UN teams, and then return. We may follow up this mission with another one - and most probably the last - on Saturday.

The relief effort continues, we have watched progress with interest from our position at the centre. The number of dead in now estimated in the 60,000s, though no one really knows.  Estimates of the number of people requiring aid is also imprecise, but is somewhere between 2 and 3 million.  This last figure is alarming and is concentrating the minds of all relief workers.

What we have is a race against death - literally. Unless aid in all its various forms - health, food, water, shelter, and so on - can be got to the people in need, the casualty rate will continue to rise inexorably, and the coming onset of winter presages an exponential increase in the effects of the disaster.


Balakot (in north of region) - flattened

Although MapAction does not directly provide succour to the victims, we are conscious every day that we must do our best to ensure that the coordinating authorities - UN, NGO, Government - possess the mapping they request.  Our maps now hang in the UN Emergency Response Centre, the Presidential Secretariat, the Foreign Ministry, and the offices of a host of aid agencies. MapAction is making a contribution however small, but we only wish we could do more.


Geoff with Pakistani Minister of Health (second from left)

We have a new member (temporarily).  Salman Ashraf, the manager of a GIS lab of the Worldwide Fund for Nature in Lahore, offered his services as a GIS mapper.  I accepted his very generous offer and also invited him to bring in a colleague, Raza Shah. These two persons will replace Jonathan and Anne when they fly north tomorrow on their missions, and the newcomers will provide reinforcements thereafter until we disengage and go home. Behind me as I write, Salman is working away at producing a detailed digital inventry of maps, data sets, and other arcane items of GISery. We look forward to welcoming his colleague. 

The pace has not slackened, and the map production process continues to meet demand.  
In passing, we are now doing a staff check among the operational pool to identify people who would be available to deploy to the Caibbean if Hurricane Wilma, now a category 5 (the highest classification) does its worst.