The Philippines

Disaster Relief Planning: Typhoon Haiyan

Your assignment is to research how we as a community (class, school, bend) could best provide some help for the Philippines. With thousands dead, no power, and no shelter, my suggestion would to be to find the most effective, cheapest way to get clean potable water to them -- but any of the basic needs that you can identify, and creatively solve are good.   

There is no best answer.  But I'd love it if you could come up with a plan upon which could be useful down the road. I'm crowd sourcing this to you; hopefully one of you will find a good cheap way to minimize the effect of disease and death from poor water moving forward. To give you evidence of the need for this; following the Haiti earthquake, Cholera has been rampant. 8,000 have died from the cholera infection following the 2010 earthquake. Tropical disease is a real concern, and I welcome your thoughts and efforts.

This may end up being just a thought experiment, but we may come up with a best plan. Be diligent, thorough, and don't settle for finding one answer. Remember, whatever your thoughts are, make sure you are finding a solution for people with no shelter, no potable water, and in a tropical environment. 

Part 1) How should the money be spent?  Identify critical areas for relief

The money should be spent providing the Philippine typhoon victims with clean water. My father has a friend who has invented portable bags, called HTI bags, that, when placed in water or a wet environment such as mud, will suck up the surrounding water into the bag while filtering out contaminants  If we could get a charity to sponsor our idea, we could prepare these bags and send them to the Philippines. This would provide the victims with instant clean water. 

Part 2) Support the idea that Charities are the most effective way to provide for relief. 

Charities are the most effective way to provide relief for the Philippines because there are fewer restrictions and administrative barriers. Charities also tend to have a more focus purpose. They also have a main focus or emphasis. If we could find a charity to help, they would get the job done quickly. They are not required to seek approval from government officials or constituents. Charities, such as the American Red Cross or the Red Crescent, would serve as good examples of charities that are designed to provide disaster relief. They have experience and the training required to carry out reliefs plans. 

Part 3) Research several Charities based on their expertise in the region, and cost efficiency (How much of each dollar goes to relief).

Samaritan's Purse is another charity that has been active in the Philippine relief support. The total annual contributions of 2012 was $425,758,580. Out of this total, $381,790,682 goes to benefitting people. This charity has been active internationally. They currently have water, sanitation and hygiene programs that they have been implementing for disaster relief. I feel that they could also find a way to use our idea of the HTI bags to administer to the Philippines to help disaster relief.  

Part 4) Come up with a cool invention for something that could be used in the future for disaster relief.

One fault with the HTI bags are that they would not provide a large amount of water for a concentrated population. These bags are designed for small quantities of water for individual use. If we could create a larger filter that could be placed on a more centralized reservoir, this would provide the community with clean water, free of bacteria and contaminants. If we could also have these filters in disaster relief kits/pods, scattered around the world at strategic locations (airports), this would help prepare for future disasters and could quickly be distributed throughout the world when disaster hits.