Monday 4 May 2015

Disaster rescue and recovery; donations

The Nepal disaster sparks up lots of conversation of people willing to help. Some just donate to large recovery organisations like the red cross, some want to send money to small local charity, others want to fly over and help. Well people time for a reality check.

In everyday life big company’s often use the just in time (JIT) method. Manufacturing and shipping items just in time, when and where it is needed. Having items laying in storage and transit it just and waste of space and resources being tied up. This makes everything more flexible and easier to adjust to what is needed, while minimizing of wasted time and resources.

A disaster area generally has lots of logical challenges. Logical workers might not show up (dead, injured, taking care of loved once or simply not able to get to work), road are blocked, equipment and buildings might be damaged or lost. Then there is a huge amount of stuff send to these areas. Clogging up at the roads and airports. This makes just in time delivery even more important than ever before. Items send must be what is needed right then, with proper equipment and personnel to train and supply people with the right items. Items that are most needed are the ones that are effective in giving the aid that is needed with minimum spend resources on site.

But the reality is that a lot of people and organisations don’t send the right things, send things at the wrong time or just send things without thinking about logistics. If you fly items in, but arranged nobody to do something with it, it will just sit there. Unsolicited help is not help. There are no surplus personnel waiting for it, if you did not arrange them. This means either send it back or just shove it aside to make space on the tarmac. Once pushed off the tarmac it will probably degrade and become useless. With other words, people fly things in, get shoved aside, spoils and become a big pile of garbage. Spending money, clogging chock points and creating garbage.

Items send to disaster area need to be kept low in required resources and personnel. For instance, bottled water is very resource and labour intensive product and creates lots of trash. Pallet of water need to put in to trucks, put in distribution sites, people need to manage and secure (yes security is a mayor factor) these sites and every single bottle needs to be brought there. Using vehicles, drivers, fuel and road capacity. These resources are in high demand, so using less of them is good. The alternative would be a water purification unit (many different sizes available), If there are water sources nearby. Once delivered on sight, it only requires very little supplies and resources to keep going.

Donated items by individuals are another class of resource intense ‘aid’. People donating their old stuff to charity and expect them to be donated to victims of a disaster. The problem with donating stuff is sorting useless stuff (a lot of useless stuff) from useful stuff, sort them in categories, sizes, clean them and bag them. If you need to get things done now, this is not a realistic option. It takes lots of time and lots of volunteers to do this.

Items also need to be the appropriate for the area. Don’t send pork to Jewish or Muslim communities. Don’t send winter coats to warm areas. Don’t send items which won’t work in those countries (wrong sockets and voltage for electrical devices). Don’t send food that need extensive cooking, when people houses are destroyed.

The most effective donations are cash, which are spend on buying supplies in and nearby the disaster area. You won’t compete with the local market, you stimulate the economic (helps the economic recovery) items are already nearby and require little transportation, items are familiar to the locals and no customs issues. 

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