Pakistani Civil Defence officials, specifically those trained by UNDAC, met the arriving team and organised internal transport to the key affected region. The pre-existing United Nations country team organised office space and coordination meetings with UN agencies and key international development focused NGOs present in Pakistan prior to the earthquake.
This was one of those times to note the difference between ‘humanitarian aid’ and ‘development aid’. Prior to the earthquake there had existed a UN Country Team in Pakistan. Largely made up of development-focused staff looking at macro-economic reform, agriculture enhancement and anti -corruption measures, the development-focused staff work under a paradigm of slow incremental change following rules and procedures.
Humanitarian emergency staff don’t do slow and don’t do incremental. The culture clash between the different personality types is always hard to manage, and in a sense the first meetings between ‘development’ staff and ‘emergency humanitarian’ staff exist to lay the ground rules: you do development in other parts of the country, we do the emergency. Some people understood the difference, others didn’t and still insisted on controlling their patch, even if they were unsuited to it.
International agencies, NGOs and governments were busily despatching emergency response teams from all corners of the globe. The question now was how all of these incoming teams would be coordinated and plugged into a mechanism for collaboration. The UNDAC team’s rapid arrival, with Pakistani government and UN in-country support, allowed for the rapid creation of three vital elements. First, the immediate establishment of an onsite coordination centre in Muzaffarabad, headed up by Rob Holden. Muzaffarabad was devastated. Most of the buildings were destroyed, telecommunications were lost, and there was no electricity, running water or food. Within this environment Rob had to set up a mechanism for coordination of all the incoming search and rescue teams from a tent. He and the team in Muzaffarabad did a magnificent job.
Second, a welcome centre for international humanitarian assistance and volunteers was established at Islamabad airport. This is a critical element in the first stages of a natural disaster as it is the “traffic cop” that directs incoming teams to the place where they are most needed. Third, a functioning coordination office was established in Islamabad. The role of the Islamabad office was to make the top-level connections with government, embassy, and military partners as well as informing the “information beast of headquarters in Geneva”. Initially my role was to act as the information coordination point between Islamabad and Geneva, but my role was to change radically and quickly.
The UNDAC team’s other initial tasks were also critical. Principal among these was the role of information focal point for incoming international search and rescue teams, donors and NGOs, through the online Virtual OSOCC (on site coordination centre). The online Virtual OSOCC is a very powerful tool managed by OCHA. When search and rescue groups from various countries make their decision to deploy to a new emergency, they register on the virtual OSOCC, indicating their departure and likely arrival times. They include the make-up of their teams and list their arrival needs.
International search and rescue teams are used to working closely with each other in different disasters around the world. Nearly 20 years prior to the Pakistan earthquake the need for better coordination of international search and rescue teams had been identified. The International Search and Rescue Advisory Group (INSARAG) was established in 1991 following initiatives of international search and rescue teams that responded to the 1988 Armenia earthquake. The United Nations was chosen as the INSARAG secretariat to facilitate international participation and coordination. The Field Coordination Support Section (Arjun’s team), located within OCHA, Geneva’s Emergency Services Branch (Gerhard’s Group), functioned as the INSARAG secretariat.
While teams are en route, the OCHA team at the airport scans through the arrival times and begins to organise groups to work together based on their language and capacity matches. Teams with search dogs are matched with teams without, and initial areas to search are allocated to those teams. By the time a search and rescue team arrives in a country the 12 hours or so travel time has been well used to set the search and rescue priorities and allocate teams to task immediately.
One of the first tasks of at least one of the UNDAC team is to find the timber and oxyacetylene gas. Search and rescue teams are incredibly courageous people who dig their way into the rubble of buildings to rescue people who may have survived in air pockets. An enormous amount of wood is needed to prop up the unsafe concrete rubble to minimise the likelihood that a rescuer could become trapped should the rubble move during an aftershock or from the instability of the collapsed pile. Strong timber beams are needed but are very heavy to transport and are best sourced on arrival.
In an urban environment many of the concrete structures are reinforced with steel reinforcing bars making the removal of concrete difficult unless it is cut with oxyacetylene torches. It is highly dangerous to carry oxyacetylene gas by air, so this needs to be sourced locally.
We were acutely aware that it was all very well to set up coordination structures in Islamabad, but the epicentre was just outside Muzaffarabad. Arjun dispatched Rob Holden to set up the OSOCC in the devastated town. Arjun was supposed to go to set up the OSOCC in Muzaffarabad but the Pakistanis refused him permission to leave the Islamabad area because he had been in the Indian Army 15 years previously and turned him back from the Chaklala military airfield in Islamabad.
One cannot underestimate the hardship and challenge that Rob had to face. He had to enter a devastated city, surrounded by death, cold nights, no electricity, with only the food provisions he brought with him. Working out of a tent, he had to establish a safe operating environment for the incoming search and rescue teams, including identifying areas for sleeping and eating while also determining the list of priority buildings to search. Without people like Rob and his colleagues in the OSOCC on the ground, initial search and rescue would have continued to be haphazard, but with Rob’s work many people’s lives were saved.
While all this was going on, I wrote the first situation report for headquarters. In the early days of a large emergency such as this, it is the UNDAC situation reports that are a primary source of information for many agents, including key donors and other organisations that may be considering deploying emergency teams.
Pakistan saw the novel experiment of the ‘reverse situation report’, whereby the headquarters, at the request of the field operation, would provide the field with a daily update of important issues for the field, much like the field situation report provides daily information for the headquarters. This novel idea only lasted four issues before the headquarters stopped this support service citing ‘too heavy a workload’ to headquarters, while still requesting a situation report from the field. One headquarters’ official went as far as to say, “Remember, Andrew, you are there to support headquarters, not the headquarters to support the field operation.” I couldn’t have disagreed more.
Cluster Management Begins We decided that the situation report should be written using a simple format based on the Humanitarian Response Review cluster recommendations. In essence, this ‘cluster approach’ divided up humanitarian response into a number of sectors including but not limited to health, food, water and sanitation, camp management, shelter, etc. An agency takes responsibility for that sector (WHO for Health, the Red Cross for some shelter scenarios, the World Food Program for food, for example) and aims to coordinate and have visibility over that sector.
Through the cluster system, the humanitarian actors can be asked to ensure that there is no duplication of action, and no unknown and unmet gaps – or at least try to. In making this simple decision we had effectively said that we would not coordinate the response in the same way as past humanitarian responses. Without saying as much, we recognised that the international system had been heavily criticised in Humanitarian Response Review process, and that we were going to imp
lement the new mechanism. Given that it is very difficult to implement a new system that had not yet been agreed, approved, or trained for, this was a risk. But what were we to do? Implement a former system that we knew was discredited, or take the risk with a new one?
Flash-funding Appeal As the initial coordination structures began to take shape we turned our minds to money. Emergency operation does not run for free and a mechanism is needed to inform the international donor community of the level of funding that is likely to be needed. The flash-funding appeal is the process by which a rough estimation of the overall emergency response costing is sent to the international donor community to begin to get national budgets ready. We decided that we would try to avoid the delay in funding by preparing a flash appeal and returning it to headquarters within 72 hours. This would be the fastest flash appeal ever.
This target was not as simple as it seems. Although it was a ‘rough and ready’ document, a whole series of assumptions needed to be made. Principal among these assumptions is a guess about how large the affected population was. The size of the affected population is the main variable in the cost of major operations. This is calculated more by educated guesswork than by factual analysis of data, because that simply doesn’t exist that early in the crisis.
Secondly, to put together a flash appeal based on the HRR cluster process we needed to bring each of the agencies already on the ground into a central location, explain the process and what we were going to implement, all without the agencies having authorisation from headquarters. To complicate the matter further, the United Nations Resident Coordinator, nominally the most senior person in the country, was not present. Jan Vandemoortele had recently been appointed as Resident Coordinator and was in New York being briefed at the time the earthquake hit. He was en route to Pakistan while we were beginning to put together the initial funding appeal.
We had decided that the flash appeal would be based on the clusters identified by the HRR process, with one additional cluster of ‘emergency education’ that had been rejected in the HRR process. Emergency education is a critical element in a natural disaster response. It involves sourcing emergency tents, books, pens and all similar items needed to re-establish children’s schooling as fast as possible. While there is an important aspect of continuing children’s education, the largest immediate impact is to put children in care for at least eight hours a day so that parents can begin to rebuild the family life as fast as possible. The psycho-social impact on children is also critical as rebuilding begins to return a ‘sense of normality’ to fragile and delicate young minds. It is always strange to me how in the developing world this is often understood better than in the developed world.
We invited all NGOs, international organisations, donors and interested parties that were represented in Islamabad to a meeting at the World Food Program’s Islamabad office where a draft guideline for a flash appeal, a short description of the ‘cluster process’ and cluster leads appointed based on the HRR recommendations were distributed. An aftershock later measuring 6 on the Richter Scale hit Islamabad and a room full of emergency workers sat as the huge oak meeting table bounced and the chandelier swung wildly. Everyone looked to the walls, hoping that they wouldn’t crack.
With little guidance, no terms of reference and no background to draw upon, these lead agencies were asked to rapidly pull together draft projects for consolidation into the flash appeal. In order to have a common planning figure I put the question to the room: “How many people do you think have been affected by this earthquake?” Numbers ranged from 2.5 to 4 million people with a collective agreement to settle on a planning figure of 3.5 million people affected, and 500,000 houses destroyed. In the after-action analysis we were able to show that our initial estimations were almost spot on, proving that if you get enough experienced people in the room and asked them to give an educated guess, the collective result will more often than not be very close to accurate.
The important thing to know about a flash appeal is that it is intended to raise money to cover the first three to six months of emergency operation. When putting together project requests, agencies need to take into account that if the request is funded, then those funds must be expended within a three- to six-month period. The flash appeal must be taken seriously by the international donor community and there is a huge risk that if agencies overestimate costs it will blow the credibility of the whole process.
Within 24 hours of the decision to draft the appeal, initial proposals had been formulated for emergency response projects totalling US$2.6 billion. This was an outrageously high amount of money and would have smashed all records of the previous flash appeals. Clearly some had not understood the process evidenced by the distinct difference between the proposals brought by people who had a development background, and people who had an emergency background.
People with emergency backgrounds are acutely aware that money will be tight. They tend to only ask for essential items. People with a development background may be tempted to take a perceived opportunity to grab funding for their pre-existing underfunded development programs. If we submitted an overly ambitious and deeply flawed flash appeal it would lose credibility and we might receive almost no funding. The appeal had to be credible.
One of the programs put forward by the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), a developmental organisation, was US$50 million for planting crops and restocking herds. This was never going to be implemented in the following six months as a country entered a Himalayan winter. Even if the money was obtained, it simply couldn’t be spent within the defined limited period, and the donors would know this. While the restocking was not a good emergency response program, it would be a good early recovery program to implement later in the cycle. In removing the request from the flash appeal, a formal complaint was made from the FAO office in Islamabad to headquarters back in Europe, creating an enormous amount of unnecessary work by people who simply didn’t understand the system.
Equally, the UNDP office put in a submission for US$1.2 billion for their early recovery programs and activities, even though there was simply no possibility that US$1.2 billion could be spent within the timeframe.
I looked at that budget line item and said to the UNDP country director (who is second in command of UNDP behind the resident coordinator) that he needed to cut the request. He said with a bit of work he might be able to drop the program down to $1.1 or maybe even $1 billion.
“You don’t seem to understand, let’s drop the zero, halve the amount and halve it again.” I was not very popular. We took his request and turned it into a much more credible US$30 million.
Jan Vandemoortele, the resident coordinator arrived at that moment and walked into the room as we were having this discussion. This was the first time I had met Jan. He was wearing a light beige woollen vest, corduroy pants and sandals with socks. If one were to judge a book by its cover one would have very little cause for happiness. Sandals with socks? In Pakistan? Give me a break. Fortunately, he was an exceptional leader for the time. When you first meet Jan you gain the impression that he is a quiet, humble man. The more you learn of him, you realise that within this quiet exterior is a man of extreme courage and character. He was a rare personality in the United Nations. If more people were like him it would be a much more effective organisation. He asked what was going on. When I told him, he backed my judgement.
Jan was and is a man entirely without ego. He was also very conscious that he was selected prior to the earthquake based on his macroeconomic knowledge and the assumption that the UN’s presence in Pakistan was to assist with on-going macroeconomic reform. Jan had never experienced an emergency and had no knowledge about how to handle one. A person less secure in his own skin might have tried to bluff or bluster. Jan on the other hand, watched, observed and supported the UNDAC team and began to assert control only as his knowledge and understanding grew to a point where he would add value to a discussion. In the two and a half years we worked together, I g
rew to respect Jan enormously as a mentor, a boss and as a fundamentally decent human being.
By the end of the first flash appeal coordination meeting we had a realistic target of US$311 million. The severe reduction came as the emergency workers in the room asserted their influence over the development workers. It was a win for logic over optimism. The development workers did have one card to play when a number of them complained to their headquarters. For political and diplomatic reasons the flash appeal was revised upwards by the OCHA office in Geneva to $521 million. A number of pet projects were included to placate other agency headquarters, including FAO’s restocking program. Six months later, at the end of the relief effort, the total actually spent during the six-month flash appeal period was $330 million. None of FAO’s money had been spent so the funds did not flow through to the agency and they were not able to claim their ‘administration fee’. While I may have been proved tight, FAO still didn’t like me.
This first flash appeal coordination meeting was more than just about funding, it was a critical step in resetting the mental state of many of the United Nations and NGO workers already in Pakistan. They had to move from the mind-set of development to the mind-set of emergency. The rules of the game had to be changed.
There is a special lexicon of language within the United Nations and NGO world. Before arriving into this world I had always assumed that ‘humanitarian work’ and ‘development work’ were the same thing, one being a subset of another. This is not the case. ‘Humanitarian’ refers to an immediate emergency assistance post-conflict or post-disaster. ‘Development’ refers to on-going programmatic interventions in developing countries as part of on-going efforts to bring those countries out of poverty.
A Life Half Lived Page 16