WITH the country now well into the most active period for typhoons, it would be wise for the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC) to produce a new template for emergency evacuation centers that are resistant to COVID-19.
The London-based global risk consulting firm Verisk Maplecroft ranks the Philippines as one of the four most unsafe countries in the world in terms of vulnerability to storms, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, landslides and other natural disasters. The three others are China, Japan and Bangladesh. COVID-19 could make things doubly worse.
The NDRRMC, along with the COVID-19 Inter-Agency Task Force, should set the standards and guidelines for new evacuation centers that hopefully will be resistant to the highly contagious respiratory disease. We certainly don’t want the centers to become super spreaders of COVID-19, in the event that local governments have to move out communities threatened by storm surges or flooding.
Our pre-pandemic temporary shelters – wherein residents are haphazardly jam-packed into school buildings and gymnasiums without adequate precautions in place – won’t work anymore. New virus-resistant evacuation centers should be less congested to allow more distancing between makeshift tents and to have segregation areas for the elderly and those with pre-existing health conditions.
We also expect the centers to have temperature scans, ample handwashing facilities and personal hygiene provisions, apart from ready supplies of face masks.
Yes, evacuation centers must be routinely disinfected, have access to personal protective equipment, provide for the contactless distribution of food packs, and staffed by first responders who can quickly spot possible COVID-19 symptoms among evacuees.
We must make it our goal to improve disaster preparedness, and strengthening our evacuation centers is a good move. This should be coupled with improved forecasting, early warning and consistent advisories, prepositioning of goods, even the forced evacuation of families in high-risk areas.
Preparedness is key to surviving disasters.
