Building resilient generations through tsunami preparedness
By: Shairi Mathur, Disaster Risk Reduction Specialist and Tsunami Project Coordinator, UNDP Bangkok Regional Hub
It was exactly a year ago, I remember vividly. I was trying to avoid getting drenched and lag behind while students from the Aleipata high school outran me quite easily. I would catch up with them under a tented area with signs that read ‘Safe Evacuation Zone’, a good kilometer away from their high school.
I was in Samoa, marking the International Day for Disaster Reduction with the first ever comprehensive school awareness drills held in the country. Under the leadership of the Disaster Management Organisation, 1,400 students from six schools simultaneously took part in evacuation drills to test their preparedness.
As the project coordinator for the UN Development Programme (UNDP) Asia Pacific’s school tsunami awareness project, I felt proud to take part in this event. The project had just started in June last year, funded by the Government of Japan, and here I was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean supporting one of the most tsunami prone countries in their preparedness efforts.
A year on, the project has conducted over a 100 school awareness drills in 18 tsunami prone countries in the Asia-Pacific region. And I have learnt so much. Almost 15 years since the Indian Ocean tsunami, and we already have generations that have grown up with no knowledge of it. Those who lived through it, don’t wish to recall it.
Since then, early warning systems that can trigger tsunami warnings have helped to save lives, yet, once in a while a terrible disaster like the recent earthquake and tsunami in Palu reminds us that systems must be maintained and upgraded to be effective.
Equally important is to know how to respond to an early warning. In Samoa, the high school where one of the drills was held was barely 150 metres from the open sea. In 2009 the school had been badly damaged by a tsunami that killed 143 people in American Samoa and Samoa.
Yet, all schools remained by the coast.
Risk assessments showed that the teachers and students would have 15 minutes to evacuate and run inland to the safe evacuation zone. On relatively flat terrain this meant running almost a kilometer away from the shoreline. A mere five minutes delay could make the difference between life and death.
But I learnt that this was not the case everywhere. On the other side of the ocean where the Maldives lie, people in Villingili island on Gaafu Alif atoll, also prone to tsunamis, had a few hours to safely evacuate. With the safest point being a mosque and a two-storey hospital on the island, most people preferred to evacuate via boat to safer islands.
I was amazed to learn that in spite of having standard good practices of conducting a safe evacuation, the flavor of the drill would differ on the context. For instance, in hilly Gizo in the Solomon Islands, school children ran up the mountain behind their school to safely evacuate.
I also learnt that the moment school children were taken out of their school premises, a host of other organisations got involved. The traffic police in crowded Tacloban City in the Philippines. The local fire and rescue services in Tonga. The village administration in Thailand and Myanmar. Even the hospital services as most schools had ambulances on call during their drill.
What was most gratifying was the feedback that we got from the schools — the principals, teachers and even students — on how important they found these drills. We discovered that many schools did not have preparedness plans, or if they did, they had never tested them.
We also realized that a drill couldn’t be conducted in isolation — information, education and awareness programmes must accompany for a holistic learning. And this could be done in a fun way too — like the rock concerts that the schools in Viet Nam organised to raise awareness of students, teachers, parents and the community.
There is still so much to learn. While planning the drills in tsunami devastated Phang Na in Thailand, we found that there were a few students with physical disabilities studying in the school. We immediately sought expert advice on how to safely evacuate them.
Conducting drills helps to identify issues that we may overlook while planning. Testing our plans is the only way to improve them.
We managed to reach schools in remote and extremely vulnerable areas. In Papua New Guinea, schools in remote areas were reached, many of them hadn’t had any kind of preparedness before. In Philippines, the drills reached nearly 20,000 students in 20 schools in the extremely vulnerable Tacloban City and Salcedo municipality.
Today, I am more than ever convinced of the need for awareness and preparedness. I have seen how empowering school children with this knowledge actually empowers the communities they live in.
As we embark on another phase of the project, I hope to see scaling up in more schools by those who we have trained already. I also hope to see ownership and leadership of the local governments and communities to invest in regular preparedness efforts, annual drills so that every child is aware and prepared. So that we can build resilient generations.
Read more: Strengthening School Preparedness for Tsunamis in the Asia-Pacific Region
Follow: #90Drills on Twitter
Copyright: UNDP Bangkok Regional Hub
