Canadians headed to the Phillipines

DART deploys to the Philippines  

 As part of Canada's response to Hurricane Haiyan, Canada is dispatching the Disaster Assistance and Recovery Team (DART) to the Philippines. This dispatch accompanies the tasking of two C-17 Globemaster cargo planes that will be providing logistical support and transporting humanitarian supplies and personel. There is an effort to fast-track travel and immigration from Filipinos from the affected regions as well.

More personally, Lt. (N) Brunner, the father of my Godson's Jack and Alex, is deploying to Roxas on the island of Panay to the UN operations center to engage in joint planning work with representatives of other nations and various NGOs to assist the Filipino people in this terrible situation.

[UPDATE: Lt. Brunner e-mailed me from Hawaii 15 NOV 2013 1330 EST to inform me his plane was refueling before taking off again enroute to the Philippines. I hope the second leg of his journey was low fuss. On the ground, I expect a brutal work schedule and a lot of psychologically tough work.]

The Canadian Area of Responsibility (AOR) will include Iloilo City, South of Roxas on the same island.

The urban areas are better off than the rural areas apparently and the rural areas are a real mess.

A number of uninformed and ignorant people have speculated on media sites that our response is slow or half-hearted. This reflects their ignorance of the nature and scope of such mobilizations. Let me take a moment to describe some of the scope of the task and then take another moment to describe the activities that must happen in a situation like this.

Hurricane Haiyan has caused thousands, possibly tens of thousands of deaths, and last I had read, had displaced nearly 600,000 people. As a comparison, the US city of New Orleans and its surrounds were hit by hurricane Katrina and it impacted and displaced 400,000 people, so Haiyan is at least 50% larger in impact, not counting another follow on Hurricane which may hit the Philippines over the next days and its impact.

The US was criticized (similarly ignorantly) for its response to Katrina by people who don't understand the scope and the resources or the challenges. I'm not defending all of the response actions in the wake of Katrina, but I happen to know CDR Makowsky, USCG (ret.) who was the officer in charge of airborne operations into New Orleans after the CG was given the responsibility to coordinate the multi-agency response. Aboard the USS Iwo Jima, he and his team coordinated over 200 aid flights or evac flights per day utilizing more than 30 helicopters and they were supported by two US Aircraft Carriers, the HSV Swift (then LCDR Pournelle, USN, XO of the Swift, a friend of mine), and many resources from civilian, law enforcement, EMS, fire, and the military of other sorts in support of the relief effort. This relief effort was executed within a country with a high level of groundside infrastructure, technology, and occurred on the same landmass as many centers which could assist and with an affluent population, many of whom had means of their own to help themselves.

In the Philippines, the geography is a number of separate islands. There are intra-island roads, but inter-island movement of goods and personnel is all by air or sea. The Philippines is a successful nation, but is not as affluent or able to muster a response as the USA and a greater % of the overall nation has been affected (Katrina: 400,000 out of 300,000,000 or about 1 in 750 people, just over 0.1% vs. Haiyan: 600,000 out of 96,000,000 or about 1 in 160 people, 0.625% or 6 times greater proportionately).

Where the US was able to muster 30+ rotary winged craft capable of operating in less than perfect weather and coordinating this response using military and civilian air traffic control and supported by an aircraft carrier then another, the Philippine military does not have those resources.

This disaster is more remote due to island topography, larger in gross numbers and relative to the ability of the government involved to respond, and more severe in terms of death toll and damage than the US Katrina situation.

You can't just throw some supplies in a bag and parachute in. That will end up with your assistance team needing assistance. To work, they need safety and security, they need communications, a way to request, get, store and distribute supplies, fuel/food/water for the disaster assistance teams, dry safe places to do medical work from assessment and triage to surgery, transit arteries to support evacuation in the air and on the ground, as well as enough pre-arrival reconnaissance to tell you where you need to go, who needs the help most and what sort of help they need. You also have to protect your people from attacks (the Philippine Army has already had firefights to protect supply convoys from attack).

You also need to work with the county's government who has to assign an area of responsibility after they come to terms with things which takes them some time. They have to be okay with allowing armed troops from a host of other nations into their country and they have to know what those nations are doing moment to moment which is a huge liaison task. Beyond that, they probably have to provide translators and guides to assist foreign military and NGOs operating in their country.

There is an order these things must be done in. It might seem slow to the outsider, but it is deliberate-fast. It's as fast as it can be to get the job done without endangering the rescuers or the rescue efforts.

The front end of this operation is permissions - diplomacy, liaison, and getting assigned an area by the host government.

Following that, there is the dispatch of survey/advance teams who scope out the security situation, the physical environment, and try to start figuring out where they can setup their headquarters to manage the response and to give them safe, dry places to begin sending out teams to do the relief work and to handle an expected inflow of injured and dead and a throughput on a large scale of humanitarian supplies. These teams need to survey roads, find dry, safe ground, figure out where the populations they need to reach are (they may have moved in response to the disaster), and to begin engineering assessments to tell the engineers where they have to go to work to open roads, address downed and dangerous power infrastructure, to tell the communications people where they need to set up communications hubs (which they need to do in cooperation with national governments and foreign nations), to tell air force personnel where they can setup forward air controllers to help control the airspace and their assistance flights, to figure out where they can establish living quarters for their assistance teams, to figure out where they can establish refueling points and resupply points for the rotary winged aircraft coming in and out, to figure out which airports can be reopened soonest to fly in supplies and more first responders, and the list of tasks goes on from there.

Once the advance team has a rough idea of where work needs to be done first to establish the aid response to allow it to be effective, then follow on teams of engineers, communications, planning, and security folk must get to those locations and start work. The larger relief effort cannot progress until minimum security is established (not much point in having your supplies hijacked or your people becoming victims too) nor until engineering can provide a minimum of light, power, heat, and dry enough accommodation to work. Communications has to be up and running with various partners and the national government. Translators must be available, at least in limited numbers.

Once the relief effort has some basic facilities, then relief teams can start arriving and beginning immediate aid with assessment, survey, triage, and urgent care. This requires transport, often by air, which means local air traffic control must be in place (usually by the military). It also requires refueling, mechanics, etc. be available to keep the birds in the air. It also requires security for the teams going out into the disaster area. It also requires at least a trickle of relief supplies be able to reach the operating area.

Over the days and weeks, facilities continue to expand, transit routes become unblocked, power starts to get restored, people get food, water and medical care, and larger volumes of supplies start being able to be deployed effectively. This can take weeks and weeks, unfortunately, but that's the fastest this can be done. Meanwhile, people are dying, disease is starting, and all sorts of other miseries are afflicting the survivors. First responders will also be starting to burn out from the 20 hour days they will be running and the emotional toll of dealing with this sort of large scale disaster.

This doesn't even begin to touch long term efforts at reconstruction and rebuilding. That's a whole other world. Just to mount a widespread first-response to immediate physical needs on the scale required by the Filipinos will take weeks even with all of the people working full time as hard as they can and a whole pile of nations throwing money, people, and expertise at the problem.

I am proud of our DART team and the other people involved in this response including the RCAF. I know they won't get to everyone fast enough - it isn't possible given the size and scope of the disaster. But I know they will be doing everything they can do, which is all anyone can expect.