Wampum

It is two years since the Boxing Day Tsunami. One affected area was the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which have restricted access, both to protect tribal populations, and because a semi-clandestine Indian national security asset is located there. Médecins Sans Frontières and Oxfam delivered relief supplies and emergency medical supplies for tribal populations to Port Blair, where it was held by the Indian Army. By January 6th I was able to thank Dr. Vint Cerf, who I know in a professional context, and who was in India the previous week. Dr. Cerf had relayed my concerns to the staff of the President of India, Dr. Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam, and to the US Ambassador to India, Dr. David C. Mulford. A few days later the MSF/Oxfam shipments were released from the Army hold and distributed to the tribal people who survived the tsunami.

We were not so successful with FEMA. Within 48 hours of the Katrina landfall, a group of wireless ISP and mobile station operators organized to deliver data and radio into the devestated area. Some of our group managed to get through the FEMA NOLA no-entry perimeter, but it was a month until we got our FEMA access authorization, by which time the Red Cross marketing effort had cornered all the relief dollars.

Our group was successful in Bay St. Louis, where we delivered a functional network, to law enforcement, as well as the residents, who'd both lost nearly everything, offices and homes, operational communications and contact with members of the immediate, and extended families. Local law enforcement and rescue centers were able to use email, voice-over-ip phones. They were able to google for hotels and generators and ice.

Climbing towers is inherently risky. We'd a broken leg. We couldn't get tower climbers from Montreal past the INS. Accidents happen. Meg Perry died when the Frida Bus rolled over.

We tasted the bitter dregs of failure, we know first hand how relief can be made to fail. We are fortunate that we were only attempting to help, and not in need of help ourselves.

I write this because Al Gore financed and and personally crewed flights, along with Dr. Anderson Spickard, Greg Simon, and others, to airlift 270 hospitalized people from within the FEMA NOLA perimeter to functioning hospitals.

Everywhere in the major donor economies, the two-year review of aid delivered to the Tsunami survivors shows that the International disaster response system is more broken than not, just as the domestic review of the governmental, and quasi-governmental relief to the Hurricanes Katerina and Rita landfall survivors shows that the American disaster response system is more broken than not.

Something to reflect upon is the paper by Dr. Gorik Ooms, Executive Director of the Belgian section of Médecins Sans Frontières, Health Development versus Medical Relief: The Illusion versus the Irrelevance of Sustainability in the on-line journal PLoS Medicine. Not simply because of the specifics of the past, the Boxing Day Tsunami, the loss of an American city, or AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, but because global warming will cause more, and more severe, failures of humanitarian relief, unless we act to change, or simply act in place of, failed public institutions.

Also posted at Draft Gore 2008 PAC.