Posted on: Monday, June 14, 2004

Pacific islands seek disaster response plan

By Vicki Viotti
Advertiser Staff Writer

Officials from 17 nations and territories in the Pacific area, which bears the world's heaviest burden from natural disasters, are meeting in Honolulu this week to map out a regional strategy for improving how the islands recover from these calamities.

The five-day Pacific Health Summit for Sustainable Disaster Risk Management will convene beginning today at the East-West Center. Delegates will represent American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands, Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Guam, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, New Zealand, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga and Tuvalu, as well as Hawai'i.

The summit is being sponsored by the University of Hawai'i School of Medicine, in association with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Pacific Emergency Health Initiative and the University of Texas School of Public Health.

However, Bruce Anderson, one of the chief planners of the meetings, said the organizers are trying to coordinate the event but to leave it up to the delegates to decide what the island nations need most to become stronger in the face of storms, earthquakes and other disasters.

During the past decade, Anderson said, the region led the world in the rates of disaster-related deaths, the percentage of population affected and the portion of gross national product that disaster damage costs.

He added that the statement the summit produces, covering risk management and public health concerns, will be presented at a United Nations disaster reduction conference in Kobe, Japan, next year. This way the region can convey in one voice what the global community can do to help, he said.

The focus will be on surviving natural disasters, although the need to prepare for terrorism response also will be discussed, said Paul Giannone, the CDC operations research scientist helping to organize the summit.

Studies have shown that Pacific island nations, home to 32 million people, fall short in healthcare facilities and in the workforce needed to recover from disasters.

The CDC has held other Pacific conferences and lent a technical assist to the Federated States of Micronesia after its landslide disaster two years ago.

Four years ago, the CDC established the Pacific Emergency Health Initiative to strengthen regional emergency preparedness. A regional training center was founded in Palau, and 400 Pacific medical and public health officials were trained.

One of the goals, Giannone said, is to have such training institutionalized in existing colleges and schools for first responders so that outsiders no longer need to come in to conduct the classes.

There are technical needs, Giannone said — some of the tiny islands have insufficient telecommunications links to their neighbors, as well as patchy transportation networks. The CDC is working on a scaled-down digital software format for an emergency response blueprint that first responders can tote around on something like a Palm Pilot, providing a more manageable connection to critical information, he said.

But it's not all about importing Western technology. Giannone, who has worked in disaster management around the globe, said developing countries general have their own coping strategies that can be tapped. He compared the Pacific situation to what he remembered of the 1999 cyclone that devastated Orissa, India.

"No one could get there for a number of days," he said. "But the people got together and estimated what food they had and which people had the greatest need, and allotted the food appropriately. They survived on their own because of their own capacity."

Strategies in the Pacific are likely to include low-tech improvements as well, he said. For example, he said, maps of landslide-prone areas can be disseminated so that villagers can be warned to relocate following heavy rains.

"I don't think we're looking for all complicated solutions," he said. "We're looking for simple things that are going to save lives."

Reach Vicki Viotti at vviotti@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8053.