Natural Disasters Require Immediate Aid, Aid Requires Skills And Tools

Picture the scene. The news channels cut to the latest news flash. Buildings crumbing under the force of a large earthquake. People flee their homes and offices, taking to their vehicles to try to escape the danger, escape the devastation.

This time, though, the pictures are more familiar, as it’s your town that’s fallen victim. Your country. You are the one in need of aid.

No-one builds a life in a home they spend thousands investing in expecting that one day they’ll find it reduced to dust at the hands of Mother Nature. Perhaps it’s a man made disaster, a plane falling from the sky or the sudden explosion of fuel at your local petrol station.

All these things can bring a happy life crashing down. You can’t predict where or when the next strike will come, but you can help those who’ve been dealt a tough hand to help put their families and lives back together.

Why Richer Countries Are Essential To The Global Future

Today we’ve reflected a little on the phrase ‘First World Problems’, something that’s caught on quickly in a connected world where anyone can communicate about the most trivial of happenings. After learning of somebody’s cold house and tepid morning shower making the most of yesterday’s hot water, we thought we’d look into how our reliance on luxuries fits into the context of the wider world. Could it be that a boiler breakdown really is newsworthy enough to tell anyone that will listen? Probably not. But it didn’t stop us writing about it!

It’s a useful reminder of our responsibilities to those less fortunate, and the obligation we should all feel to those that don’t benefit from a roof over their heads.

Why Tools Are The Foundations Of Disaster Recovery

Natural disasters are the single most destructive force known to mankind, with the ability to destroy towns in a few short minutes. Whether it’s earthquakes bringing down buildings, tsunamis washing them away or hurricanes carrying away anything in their path, they all leave huge trails of destruction.

Heavily flooded landIt’s not just tsunamis that cause floods either, an earthquake can rupture water supply pipes and quickly cause floods of their own, or even trigger tsunamis themselves. The damage water does is extreme, with homes being wrecked, businesses interrupted for extended periods, and authorities left paralysed in helping citizens until the water subsides. Infrastructure in terms of drainage can only do so much, and that in itself can be destroyed when disaster strikes.

Only once the immediate threats fade can the clean up begin, and repairing the damage usually takes many years, if it’s ever completed at all. There are two fundamental problems in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, firstly to get food and clean water to those that are affected, and secondly the pressure to get the emergency work started to let the community begin to build up from the ruins.

Agencies like the Red Cross do a remarkable job with distributing supplies, usually launching a fast response within hours of the news of a disaster spreading. Rebuilding, however, is often slower to get moving, and rightly so, as keeping the people alive has to take priority. However, when attention begins to turn to progressing with rebuilding and repairing the damage, there are often limited supplies of materials and tools to do the jobs, even though the communities often have plenty of skilled labour available.

Power tools are often destroyed in flooding – even in these emergency situations it’s not worth risking the use of wet electrical tools, and there’s rarely power restored that quickly anyway. That means that the initial work is typically done with manual tools, the sort that you’ll typically used for small home improvement jobs. Imagine trying to build a house with a hack saw and screwdriver. That’s where some of your generously donated secondary aid money comes in, to replace the power tools once power is restored. You’ve only got to take a look at mitre saw reviews on the internet to see how much each item costs, just think how much needs to be spent to rebuild an entire city, or even an entire region. Fortunately, many of the large companies that manufacture these tools help by donating large quantities of their products, either for nothing or at significantly discounted rates to get the projects underway. There are also fundraisers across the globe that raise money to help the victims of these crises get back to something resembling a normal life as fast as possible.

In the UK, Comic Relief provides such funding, all given by generous gifts from members of the public, corporate responsibility initiatives and government funding. This help is vital when disaster strikes, and your money directly helps feed, cloth and provide shelter for those who are desperately in need, as well as provide essential basic healthcare in those parts of the world where there is no NHS, local GP or hospital to help vaccinate against, or treat diseases.