my news feed is a jumble of pro-pnoy, anti-pnoy, help tacloban, help survivors, find this person, secure this place, donate this, donate that, corruption, and an even more serious jumble of hashtags and tags and people blaming and back-stabbing each other. it's a sadly recurring scenario whenever catastrophic calamities strike that i could forecast to a good approximation what sort of news will come out in the next few weeks following the event. speedy access to information is critical to a lot of operations but the internet has also made a lot of people a master of things they actually have no idea about and it's making accurate information gathering a harder thing to do. indeed, if one wishes to obtain correct data, then facebook is definitely not your go-to source for information. personally i do believe the government is also doing their duty in the best way they can. of course they have their own more secured and faster lines of communication that's why we never get reliable info on social media.
anyhow, i am not discussing the competencies of the philippine government now. what follows is a series of ideas that probably aren't unique, someone might have thought about it before or i might have gotten the exact train of thought from someone else, but it's my work in progress in trying to analyze the cause of the hardships my country is facing. and, of course, one tries to look for solutions.
it does not take much effort to note and understand that the philippines is not a stable country, literally. it stands on the border of the pacific plate making it prone to earthquakes and heavy volcanic activity as opposed to countries located on the interior of the plates themselves which are generally free of earthquakes (take belgium for example, no earthquake in almost 5 years!). furthermore, it stands on the brink of the pacific ocean making it virtually unshielded from typhoons formed over the pacific.
so there you have it, we have nice tropical weather all year round but (as my professor would say) there's no free lunch. we will always be battered by earthquakes and typhoons and volcanic activities until this little group of islands become so scattered apart it no longer resembles the philippines of 2013 or the plates decide it's high time to swallow the philippines.
but until that time we have 97 million people trying to make a living, squeezed into our little group of islands. and what happens in the philippines is this: we go through a certain calamity, we help rebuild the affected areas, then we relax and wait for the next big calamity to strike. the problem is, the threat of these kind of disasters is always imminent. some things you can predict can give you time to prepare but other times calamity strikes without a warning and when that happens we're left helpless once again. the sad thing is, most of the country's remaining funds are being channeled into rescue, relief, and rebuild operations whenever some big calamity strikes it's siphoning funds supposedly allocated for other projects. (okay, i have no concrete evidence for this last part, just intuition and some common sense because where else would the government get funds? yeah, loan, of course, and international aid..but still..)
what can we possibly do to minimize casualties and damage? in my former company, despite the tedious paperworks that go with it, closure and root cause analysis seems pretty effective (when done properly). i strongly believe that once relief operations in this yolanda calamity, for example, has stabilized, the government officials should not pat each other in the back and give themselves a holiday for the good job of helping rebuild a city. no! what needs to be done is to call in order a meeting to discuss what preventive measures failed, what unexpected situations arose, and what needs to be done in order to prevent those kind of things from happening again. talks and investigations like these are being done, yes (like the investigation done after sendong) but somehow it ends with a lot of finger-pointing and implementation of short-term, unsustainable action items and we end up missing the point of coming up with long term action plans. it's like the annoying backlog in your todo list.
anyway, on a side note, what i have learned, and i shall never forget, is that in root cause analysis one cannot implicate an individual or the lack of time. this means, you cannot say the relief operation failed because mr. so-and-so doesn't know what to do. instead, you say, the responsible person is untrained in relief operations, for example. you see, it works positively in two ways. one, you're not stepping on somebody else's foot. you may be questioning his capabilities in some way but you're not stepping on his dignity. everybody makes mistakes, it's our moral responsibility to help him not to make the same mistakes twice. two, it's more objective, i suppose. as an action item you can therefore say "train personnel in relief operations" as opposed to "remove mr. so-and-so from office" or "train mr. so-and-so in relief operations". get what i mean?
some action items i have come up with (in no specific order) are the following:
1. short term: train a considerable number of personnel for relief and rescue operations that should be able to be deployed and operate within a day of a calamity. in the best case, the team should be ready by december considering we get a considerable amount of strong typhoons in december too.
2. short term: develop a process for the speedy implementation of relief and rescue operations. we must have some existing process, i suppose, so i'd like to add: furthermore, specify how and where in the process civilians and other non-government aid can enter. (this is a long and tricky item, it needs to be broken down further)
3. long term: educate and train all citizens on what to do when calamity strikes. yep. i read somewhere about how people used to really prepare for typhoons in the past. i agree that in the modern times people are getting too used to the comfort of city living and too dependent on the safety provided by man-made structures we sometimes forget practical rules for survival. plus, having modern infrastructures means we have a slightly different sort of emergency plan compared to before. so yep, we should be re-educated time and again.
4. long term: improve and develop infrastructures that is strong enough to withstand typhoons but flexible enough to withhold earthquakes. this is a huge engineering problem. let's look at cold countries, countries that experience winter, like belgium for example. they had houses made of timber wood and the like in prehistoric times. in order to get warmer in winter they developed tools and techniques and over the course of hundreds of years, improved their infrastructures. now most (if not all) houses in belgium are made of thick stone and concrete. glass windows are aptly layered and framed to keep the cold out whilst keeping it's aesthetic value. my point is, winter is inevitable. it comes yearly so might as well develop infrastructures and technologies that can help ward off the cold. like i said, it's a huge engineering problem. it might take years to develop, but might as well start now, right? on the other hand, you might say, they can have stones over their heads if they want, they don't experience much earthquake anyway. well, yes, so i suppose we can also observe how japan does it. why japan? japan is also in the ring of fire and is constantly ravaged by typhoons. why are their infrastructures still standing? can we implement those kinds of methods here in the philippines? i believe the government should put a serious amount of focus into improving our infrastructures (particularly sewerage).
(TBC)
