Tsunami nations lend disaster advice to U.S.
Tsunami nations lend disaster advice to U.S.
Ed Cropley, Reuters/Bangkok/Jakarta
Police in the United States must not rush to identify the bodies
of Hurricane Katrina victims too quickly or they will run the
risk of countless mistakes, the head of Thailand's tsunami
identification operations said on Monday.
"They need to examine the bodies slowly and put all the data
into a computer," said Nopadol Somboonsub, a police general in
charge of the Thailand Tsunami Victims Identification Center on
the southern resort island of Phuket.
"It's very important to get it right. You cannot assume that
this or that body is the right body simply because a relative
identified it," he said, adding that identity theft and life
insurance fraud were realities in the wake of massive disasters.
As the head of the largest forensics operation in history,
trying to put names to the 5,395 bodies of at least 25
nationalities left in Thailand by the Indian Ocean disaster,
Nopadol does not speak without authority.
Nor is he alone in Asia in seeing the TV images of bloated
corpses in New Orleans and death tolls estimated in the thousands
and thinking how the experiences of the region after the Dec. 26
tsunami might help the United States after Katrina.
Budi Atmadi, head of relief operations in the Indonesian
province of Aceh, which bore the brunt of the killer tsunami
waves, said rescue workers must not let criticism from victims,
politicians or the media deflect them from their jobs.
"The early days after the disaster are always panic
situations," said Atmadi, the deputy secretary of Bakornas BPB,
Indonesia's equivalent of the U.S. Federal Emergency Management
Agency (FEMA).
"In that period, the blame game is rampant because one person
will always say the relief has been slow while another says there
are so many limitations," said Atmadi. "The blame game will
always be there so your ears need to be thick.
"The important thing is to stay committed and put humanitarian
concerns at the top."
In a sign of solidarity with the United States, which sent a
massive military relief effort after the tsunami, Indonesia's
Coordinating Minister for People's Welfare Alwi Shihab plans to
fly to New Orleans with 5,000 blankets and 30 medical officials.
In India, where officials say the grassroots are the key to
successful relief operations, some felt the United States -- the
world's most powerful nation -- might have slipped up by thinking
itself a match for anything Mother Nature could muster.
"In a disaster, the biggest fallibility can be to think you
are experts. Disasters have a way of humbling even the
mightiest," said one senior Indian official at the heart of New
Delhi's tsunami response.
"In India, for all its vastness, we have a very easily
operable contingency plan for disasters at the grassroots level.
It is not a highly complicated national response system," said
the official, who asked not to be identified.
"A person at the grassroots level knows that sandbags have to
be organized, identifies likely places of breaches, plans
clearing debris and setting up relief camps and cooking centers,"
he said.
"From what I have read about Katrina, it doesn't seem to have
happened this way there. They seemed to have focused on Florida
and got caught unawares in New Orleans," he said.