After more than 20 years as an engineer in the British army, retired Colonel Brian Ward helped to set up the Asian Disaster Preparedness Centre (ADPC) in Bangkok. He told AlertNet how military skills could be used for peaceful purposes.AN: You started ADPC in 1986. What was the background?BW: The Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), which became our parent institute, had an interest in forming us because I had visited them to try and market a crisis management simulation service. The faculty saw an opportunity for getting involved. I spoke to the then-director and he was very interested in the idea. I was asked to do a feasibility study before starting it up. The Asian countries I went to were interested in getting training in management, information systems and networking. The United Nations, the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) gave us the start-up money and AIT gave us a home. The centre is over-dependent on project funding. I hope that, in time, it will receive more direct support from the countries which it serves, and also be able to build up its own endowment funds to give it greater freedom.AN: What is the work of the ADPC?BW: It is a regional resource centre working towards disaster reduction for safer communities and sustainable development in Asia and the Pacific. It is an important neutral focal point in the region for promoting disaster awareness and the development of local capabilities to foster institutionalised disaster management and mitigation policies. We do some work with governments in the field but most of our work is matching the appropriate training to the people we are working with, be they villagers or policy-makers. We went out into the field after the Gujarat earthquake (in January 2002). There we helped the government develop their long-term strategy for rehabilitation allowing them to get on with the short-term work. You mustn’t do anything in the aftermath of a disaster to impede short-term work.AN: Do you work on all types of disasters?BW: We are trained to look at natural disasters, but I take the view that, if you are preparing for relief work, it doesn’t make much difference what the disaster is. The needs of the victim are the same. Prevention is a different thing from relief. We have switched our focus towards prevention, as it should be. Because relief organisations have got more sophisticated in their approach, we have compounded the problem by separating out the different areas of relief work. I believe it should all come under the same umbrella. AN: How do you build local capabilities?BW: Perhaps the most important thing is to prove to disaster-prone communities and countries just how much they can do to help themselves and wean them from the dependence syndrome. It is a confidence-building exercise helping them to analyse risks and raise public awareness, showing them the techniques of pre-disaster planning, practising crisis management and training in general. A person who is intrinsically a good manager will cope in a disaster even if he or she has not had any formal training, though obviously a bit of training will help. Training is the improvement of skills, with emphasis on team building. Disaster management education, the improvement of personal knowledge, is also important, but I believe it is better conducted by formal education institutions. We must, however, avoid mystifying it. Disaster management is a function of routine administration.AN: What made you want to move from running an efficient war machine like the British Army to setting up a disaster relief organisation?BW: I retired from the Royal Engineers in the early 1970s. The more senior you get in the army the more desk-bound you become. I had a very good and enjoyable 20 years as a soldier but I did not want to become a Whitehall warrior. Also, in 1963 whilst I was still serving, the island of Bali was hit by a devastating volcanic eruption which killed more than 1,000 people. At that time the U.K. still had a substantial military presence in southeast Asia, but we were involved in confrontation with Indonesia. I was disappointed that we did not declare a temporary truce and deploy our forces to help the Balinese. At that time it may have been naive to suppose that the military of one country could be deployed to help another country in a humanitarian operation. Now, I am delighted to see that this concept is gaining increasing credence. It is ironical that Bali is now in the news again, struck by a different type of disaster. When I retired I was offered a job representing the U.N. in Indonesia. From there I got into disaster management and the ADPC. AN: What is it about the military that makes you think it can play a role in disaster relief and preparedness?BW: I am a sapper, a Royal Engineer. Part of a sapper's job is to repair some of the havoc of war. So you could say that sappers are, by profession, well equipped for disaster management. They have resources and are well organised. They are accustomed to operating in a crisis because that is what war is all about. They are accustomed to planning for such a crisis, which most people aren’t. And they spend a great deal of time training for it. The military are always making risk assessments, creating contingency plans and training for it. They can help the people learn and at the same time practise themselves. It is like going to church: the first time you go it feels a bit strange, but the more often you go it becomes more natural. Training for a situation where a whole village becomes homeless is difficult for everyone at first but you pick up more and more each time. I saw an Indonesian military commander organise a mock volcanic eruption which would destroy all the houses in a village. The locals took part. The adults played the part of fleeing villagers and children played injured people. The army spent the day catering for them. It helped everyone involved, both military and villagers, and they enjoyed it.AN: Your work with ADPC is lessening but you are still actively involved in the Damage Assessment and Needs Analysis programme. How does that work?BW: We found that, after a disaster, people are very good at saying what has happened in extraordinary detail. But they were not very good at moving on to the next step. They would tell us how many houses were knocked down but they wouldn’t tell us how many people were homeless. This programme created a system where we could systematically log all of the relevant information to help deal with the disaster effectively. The whole emphasis of it is not what has happened but what needs to happen.
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