Why aid delivery isn’t instant — and ways it could be faster

By Abbi Luz

Note: This is a shorter version of the original blog, which can be found at theabsterabbi.com

When Oxfam’s rapid assessment teams came back from Leyte and Eastern Samar, they came from a total information blackout into a storm of angry and combative debate on the efficiency of government response to supertyphoon Haiyan victims. A couple of my colleagues marveled at how negative the atmosphere was and admittedly, the debate has gotten pretty exhausting and polarizing.

Everywhere I go, whether it’s a dinner, a team meeting, an email exchange or social media, the conversations run along the same questions. Why is government response so slow? With so many donations pouring in, why are people still saying they aren’t being served? Where are our donations going to if we’re still not moving fast enough? Why should we give it to the government when they are moving so slowly? 

So to take a step back, I’m going to take a look at what hinders aid delivery in the context of supertyphoon Haiyan. Once again, a caveat; this is not meant to be the end all and be all on this topic, only meant to give you a better picture of what humanitarian workers experience on the ground when we’re struggling to give aid at the quickest possible time.

So why is delivery of aid not as quick as it should be? Here are some key things that affect it:

Scale 

One reason why Haiyan is capturing the attention of the world is the incredible and unprecedented scale of this disaster. The winds, radius and strength of the storm was literally unlike anything ever seen in the world. I know firsthand from my vantage point an island over how early warning came in, which enabled a number of areas to prepare for the supertyphoon. Preemptive evacuations were called, standby funds and relief were prepositioned and classes/work were cancelled in advance. But measures which have worked well for other instances, were insufficient for Haiyan.

Though I would prefer that you prepare for the very worst, the question is, how do prepare for it when you can’t even imagine what the worst is?

In the last few years, the Philippines has been sorely tested by intense typhoons. We’re at the point that we’re constantly readjusting the scale, from the Ketsana rains that poured a month’s worth of rain in the span of a day, monsoon rains that are now flooding cities for months out of a year and typhoon Bopha, which was the storm of the century… at least until Haiyan happened.

Government Capacity

I won’t go into a lot of detail about government capacity because a lot has been said about it already. But to be brief, government capacity deals with both national and local government. The way disaster management has been set up in the Philippines is that it’s been largely decentralized to the local governments with the national government supplementing local capacity.

So what happens now when a supertyphoon of the scale of Haiyan completely overwhelms entire municipalities and cities, including the local government? You lose your first round of defense. In Tacloban, they talk about the police force being cut down from the hundreds to the tens. Not only have actual offices been damaged or destroyed, but the people themselves are missing or worse, dead. The ones who are still alive are also concerned for families and homes that have been completely damaged.

In the latter quarter of the year, we were hit in quick succession by the Zamboanga crisis on September 9, Tropical Storm Santi went through Northern Luzon in the first week of October, the 7.2 magnitude earthquake in Bohol woke citizens up from a holiday on October 15 and then Supertyphoon Haiyan blasted Visayas region on November 8. The first three emergencies may have faded into the background because of Haiyan but Zamboanga continues to struggle with prolonged displacements in the thousands with houses and streets damaged by the armed conflict, TS Santi inflicted billions in agricultural damages and Bohol has still not completely gotten back on its feet and continues to feel the aftershocks.

Infrastructure

Infrastructure involves roads, bridges and highways; power; communications; airports and ports, etc, and the affected population is not just dependent on that, but responding agencies as well. Unless you have prepositioned stocks inside affected areas that are undamaged and ready to be distributed, aid will not be instantly given the day of the disaster. And as evidenced by Haiyan-affected areas, local government units did not have that. When it comes to giving aid, infrastructure plays a large role in speed and timeliness of delivery.

This is what we look at as soon as a big disaster hits:

• Do we have access? How do we get in?
• Are there airports? When will it start functioning? Is it completely damaged?
• If the airport is completely damaged, where is the next nearest airport? How do you cross from there to the nearest area?
• Are ports open? When will ports start functioning? What sort of seacraft can be accommodated by these ports?
• If there are absolutely no airports or ports, can choppers land? Where can they land? Is the visibility and weather okay for choppers to land anywhere?
• Are roads and bridges damaged? What kind of vehicles can pass through?
• If there are accessible roads, is there fuel available for vehicles?
• Is there flooding? Landslides? Flashfloods?

These are just questions on access. When compounded with other obstacles to infrastructure, imagining asking these questions but interspersing it once in a while with any of these:

• Are telecommunications functioning in the areas? Are there landlines?
• Do we have access to baseline information? How many families are there? Do we know how many have been affected?
• Is there electricity? What does it mean if there’s none?

And then there’s the element of not just figuring out if you can just do assessments, meaning sending quick and lean teams to analyze the need for a response, but if you need to possibly start responding as well. If the need is as large as caused by Haiyan, then you’re not just thinking about access for a small team of people but people + aid. Then you have to search for ways to get cargo and bulk items in, which is a whole different story from getting a few people in. For every question you have to answer, there’s an added question of:

• How much can a plane carry?
• If airports are damaged or runway lights are down, how much can a chopper carry?
• If there is very little visibility or choppers can’t land, how much can a boat carry? How fast can a boat get there?
• Once inside an area, can you even truck aid?

Dealing with infrastructure problems is a constant weighing of options that looks very much like this:

time x resources x efficiency x priority

What do I mean? For example, as in the case of Haiyan, with no commercial flights coming in and out of the area, you have to ask if chartering private choppers is a good option. It’s fast and can get you into the areas (all you need is a flat plain or piece of land) but it is very expensive. Some would argue that the cost of chartering a private chopper is wasting more money that could be spent on aid. But when there is no one able to access the areas immediately after, sometimes it’s worth going in just to get an accurate sense of what’s happening. But in rushing to get in as fast as you possible, you end up forgoing being able to bring enough aid with you. Private charters or choppers are quick and fast but can only carry so much.

Resources

Every emergency and every aid agency, though they coordinate or collaborate with each other, inevitably will find itself competing with each other for the same pot of resources. I’ve talked about the Philippines being hit by a series of emergencies with the fund largely being the national calamity fund. But that’s not even talking about the pot of resources the world has. I’ve felt in the last few big disasters that there is always a shortage of funds. Big ones, like Haiyan, will have a huge influx of donations and aid but will end up trickling as the world gets to the end of its available pot of resources. In the last few years, big emergencies have not realized the full amount needed to completely support disaster-affected areas (i.e. Syria and Bopha).

It’s also not just a question of competing in the same pot, since this isn’t really what’s happening right now for Haiyan and the world being so generous. It’s also about the kind of donations that have been coming in. Donations are flowing for food and for clothing, but they aren’t necessarily the best things to be donated. Immediately following a disaster, when access is difficult and a little extra has to paid for access and relief delivery, then money is the best option (and agencies might not necessarily have this available). Food packs and clothing will be assembled wherever a big part of the population are, but they aren’t necessarily in disaster-affected areas. Relief packs can end up accumulating but will still need money for logistics in order to deliver this quickly to disaster-affected areas.

Security

Security is a huge issue in Haiyan for areas like Tacloban. For any humanitarian agency, there’s always that wariness of sending teams into insecure areas for many reasons. Humanitarian agencies aren’t necessarily the best people to deal with the situation (not having expertise dealing with a certain group or not having the right security measures in place, for example) and most likely have a mandate not to deal with armed groups, as an impartial or neutral organization. And of course, there’s also the reluctance to send teams into a situation where there is a possibility that your people could be harmed.

With reports populating the media like choppers being mobbed by hundreds of looters or that armed groups are wandering the areas, agencies are understandably wary about putting their staff in that position. Aid workers are minimal compared to the actual affected population and if placed in that kind of position, would be at risk.

But more importantly, given the current problems with access and the limitations with how much can be brought in, humanitarian agencies also don’t want to put the affected populations in harmful situations. For example, only being able to bring in food packs for 100 families, when there are a thousand hungry ones  who will do everything they can to get the first food they’ve had in days might create a terrible situation for the affected. Instead of helping the people who are in need, you might actually be adding to their insecurity.

Information

I read an extremely interesting and informative article on Time magazine the other day entitled “Stop Catastrophizing Relief Efforts in the Philippines” Information can be tied up with security that in the sense that when communication systems are minimal, we do rely on news and media to give us ideas of what’s happening on the ground. When there are cases of looting or armed groups, then that will put pause in plans to ensure that distributions or any kind of relief delivery has a contingency plan for any kind of possible situation.

Information or the lack of, also causes obstacles to aid delivery. For example, the kind of blanket devastation in Haiyan tells you that you need to give to everyone but you also need to how many families that are affected to give everyone sufficient aid. Without knowing how many people to give to and then hearing about looting makes it more difficult to be able to deliver relief right away. You’d want to ensure that you have a complete set for everyone to minimize security risks.

So with that laundry list of obstacles to aid delivery, what can be done to make it faster?

• Coordination is key. When resources are tight, you look to other agencies to fill in where your gaps start. This involves knowing who the other agencies are on the ground and having the sort of relationship to work together instead of duplicating aid.
• Identifying and working with local capacity. The Philippines has a very robust civil society, with a thousands of legitimate NGOs working with great capacity. And with the number of disasters we’ve been hit with, a lot of those NGOs are already working in disaster management. Local partners have the information, the networks, the capacity and the people; in short, they’ve laid down the groundwork for a humanitarian agency coming from outside to just supplement.
• An efficient information management system. The Philippines really needs to move on towards making the information system open and comprehensive. Being able to have baseline data or secondary data available and prepared in such a way that it doesn’t disappear during a disaster helps improve coordination and planning from hour zero of the disaster.
• A backup calamity fund. I think here in country, we have to get used to the idea that we are losing a huge amount of money on disaster response yearly. By the end of the year, I can safely bet that we will continue to drain this until it ends. When this happens, what is our alternative? Here in the Philippines, we have the Philippine Survival Fund, which is meant to allocate a billion pesos towards helping communities adapt to climate change. Unfortunately, though this law has passed, it hasn’t been operationalized, meaning that fund and that kind of preparedness by focusing on climate change adaptation isn’t happening.
• Get used to the new normal. We have to stop being surprised at how big disasters are getting in the Philippines. We are in every top 5 list of disaster-prone countries and countries most likely to suffer the most from climate change. All these researches done by credible research institutions say the same thing a person from a rural community without access to technology and information can tell you, that the weather is changing in more and more severe ways.
• Preparedness. And of course, this, the most important recommendation in my book. Preparedness doesn’t just come for preemptive evacuations and early warnings, but has a wide menu of options that can be done to prepare an area for a disaster.For example, we talked about how local capacity was overwhelmed; then identify the next line of defense that can come in to support you when your local capacity is exhausted (for example, Albay Provincial Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office taking over in Leyte for the meantime).

  Or if you can identify that infrastructures are down, put in place alternatives to be able to bring aid in, like standby airports, aircraft or seacraft (the U.S.S. ship/airport is amazing), warehouses, etc. Or the ultimate in disaster risk reduction, like the Cebu island that evacuated every single person from the island to ensure zero casualties. Investing more on what should be done before several disasters will mean less expense responding to the impacts of just one.

Abbi Luz is working as a humanitarian staffer for emergencies and disaster risk reduction with Oxfam in the Philippines. The views expressed in this posting are her own and do not necessarily represent Oxfam’s positions or policies. This is a shorter version of the original blog, which can be found at theabsterabbi.com