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December 1, 2005
Dear Members and Friends of GHI,
These past 12 months can be considered as the Year of Natural Disasters: the tsunami and its aftermath in South Asia; Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma; heavy floods in Europe; and the Pakistan earthquake. For the moment, the whole world is very much aware of such threats. At GHI, we hope that this attention will lead to more opportunities for our message of preparedness, prevention and mitigation to be heard and acted upon. I’d like to inform you in this newsletter about some of the ways in which we are using this opportunity to promote risk reduction where it is needed most.
Post-tsunami Actions
We have continued our efforts to develop and apply tools for tsunami response and mitigation planning that threatened communities can customize and implement according to their own particular needs. Since the tsunami on December 26, 2004, there has been a well demonstrated interest and promise of funding to install and operate tsunami warning systems consisting of networks of buoys and seismometers to detect tsunamis in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans and the Caribbean Sea regions. However, there remains a need to build the capabilities of national emergency management offices and local communities, particularly in developing countries, to respond to tsunami warnings and to mitigate tsunami effects. A great deal of information and experience currently exists on how nations and communities could respond to tsunamis, but this information is scattered, inconsistent and usually applicable only to the needs of developed countries. Tsunami safety ultimately rests with the actions taken in tsunami-vulnerable communities before tsunamis occur.
To assist these communities to take these critical preparatory actions, GHI will prepare community-based response materials for use in threatened areas. We are grateful to have received initial support for this work from the National Research Council of the U.S. National Academies through a special tsunami relief and rebuilding fund. This fund was created with donations from employees and matching contributions from the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine. Preparing needed materials is the first step that will lead to a tsunami response plan for a pilot community, possibly in Indonesia. In December I will travel to Indonesia with Tom Tobin, GHI’s Chief Operating Officer, for the purpose of planning work there that we are proposing with Kerry Sieh, Professor of Geology at Caltech. (As most of you will know, for over ten years Kerry has been studying the Sumatran plate boundary, where the December 26 earthquake-tsunami occurred.) We expect to meet with Teddy Boen, a member of GHI’s Board of Advisors, in Jakarta, as well as with colleagues of Kerry and staff members of MercyCorps.
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