Engineering help needed in many places

摘要

As 2011 commenced and the Year of Humanitarian Engineering began to unfold, emergency humanitarians were nervous. RedR Australia engineers and specialists in water and sanitation had just completed assignments in Haiti, following the 2010 earthquake, and Pakistan was prominent in our deployments, after the massive 2010 floods affecting a staggering 20 million people. Central to the nervousness was an already soaked Pakistan facing a new wet season by August and the question whether RedR would have sufficient resources to answer all calls for help. Little did we know that worse was to come - first the Christchurch earthquake, New Zealand's largest ever natural disaster; then the Japanese earthquake and tsunami which smashed a province to pieces and generated a nuclear disaster. While engineering responses from Australia helped New Zealand, Japan by and large handled its own response. Also, fortunately the Pacific islands had only near-misses, as the cyclone season threatened Cook Islands, Fiji and Vanuatu at various times. Wind and water damage required only local response.