Once the initial phase of a clear up is complete after Mother Nature strikes, there’s usually a lot still to do. The early phases tend to focus on survival after the disaster and ensuring that people can eat, so it’s the simple things like shelter and basic medical care that take up the focus of aid teams. Once a stability has been achieved, though, it’s down to the people to continue their journey back to something resembling normality.
Helping Communities Regain Control Over Their Own Destiny
When you think of a clean up, you probably imagine that would include the sanitising of buildings and living spaces, but that’s often not the case. Disaster clean ups are intended to get communities back to ground zero – a place where they can start to fend for themselves once more. Simple tasks like cleaning the mess (likely sewage) from the walls of their homes may be far more difficult in the aftermath, so you’ll typically find supplies of portable petrol jet wash machines that run on diesel or gas. It’s no use having the electric powered versions to use in these areas, as there’s unlikely to be reliable power supplies in the foreseeable future.
The real advantage of using self powered pressure washers is that they provide a fast solution that can be used across small communities, improving sanitation and appearance of the remaining buildings and their surroundings fairly rapidly. Of course, the water itself that needs to be used will be unlikely to be very clean, but the power jets this machinery provides helps to make the best of available resources.
We’ve covered the advantage to local people in being able to start to fend for themselves. The next big advantage of moving to self sufficiency is that it frees up aid teams to work on more productive projects than house to house problem firefighting. Instead they may choose to work on getting clean drinking water supplies up and running, setting up food distribution chains or even setting up makeshift hospitals and other medical care as a temporary measure until better options are available.
Such a simple thing as a pressure washer can make so much difference in accelerating the rebuilding of communities and giving people the chance to feel like they’re regaining the control of their lives that was so abruptly stolen from them. Disaster response is such a critical part of survival in the hours and days in the immediate aftermath, simple co-ordinated efforts such as these can make all the difference.