Donate for cyclone recovery

5 comments on “Donate for cyclone recovery ”

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1. lprent 1

   16 March 2015 at 8:15 am

   Northland was relatively unscathed
   https://nz.news.yahoo.com/a/-/local/26676681/northland-largely-unscathed-in-pams-wake/

   And it looks like the cyclone is passing well out from east cape.
   http://www.weatherwatch.co.nz/content/cyclone-pams-centre-moves-closer-northern-new-zealand-5-maps

   The cyclone track was luckily further east than the worst case scenarios. We got lucky this time.

   Not a particular problem here. Just a bit of drought relief on the east of the north island.

   Looks like it hit Vanuatu hard.
2. weka 2

   16 March 2015 at 8:22 am

   Aid agencies reported that around 90% of houses in Port Vila have been destroyed, many people displaced, and schools ripped apart. Oxfam Australia’s executive director Helen Szoke said:

   It’s becoming increasingly clear that we are now dealing with worse than the worst case scenario in Vanuatu. This is likely to be one of the worst disasters ever seen in the Pacific.

   Up to 75,000 children in Vanuatu could be in desperate need of food, water and shelter, Save the Children has said.

   ‘Lack of urgency’ on climate change, says World Bank V-P

   As reported earlier, Vanuatu’s president, Baldwin Lonsdale, is, by coincidence, at the UN world conference on disaster risk reduction in Japan, from where AFP sends this report:

   Despite ominous predictions of mass devastation in cyclone-wrecked Vanuatu, policymakers at a UN disaster meeting in Japan do not seem to understand the pressing need to tackle climate change, the World Bank warned Sunday.

   A state of emergency has been declared in the impoverished Pacific nation, where dozens are feared dead after one of the most powerful storms ever recorded smashed through. Aid agencies have spoken of “grave fears” over the scale of the human tragedy.

   But Rachel Kyte, World Bank vice president and special envoy for climate change, said there appeared to be a disconnect between policy and the increasingly-frequent weather-related disasters the world is suffering.

   “I worry that a sense of urgency and a sense of shared ambition is not at the right level,” she told AFP in an interview on the sidelines of the UN conference on disaster risk reduction in Sendai, Japan.

   “It’s hugely ironic that this storm should hit Vanuatu while we are all here. If we truly care for those people, we have to respond,” she said, referring to the need for environmental commitments.

   Kyte told AFP:

   I don’t think I would say climate change caused [Cyclone] Pam, but I would say the fact is in the past three or four years we’ve seen category fives coming with a regularity we’ve never seen before.

   And that has some relationship with climate change. It is indisputable that part of the Pacific Ocean is much warmer today than in previous years, so these storms are intensifying.

   We may have helped communities become resilient to the kinds of storms we experienced in the past, but resilience to a storm with wind speed of up to 300km per hour – that’s a whole new intensity.

   http://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2015/mar/15/cyclone-pam-aid-agencies-head-to-vanuatu-as-death-toll-rises#block-55053188e4b08cb82df08263

   That last quote might want to make NZers sit up and take notice if nothing else.
3. Lanthanide 3

   16 March 2015 at 8:37 am

   While not wanting to minimize what has happened in Vanuatu, it is worth reflecting that the traditional style of construction for their houses in some ways are a lot better during these types of storms.

   Houses made with western style materials, unless completed to a high standard (or are literally concrete bunkers), are likely to come apart during these storms and turn into missiles, as well as simply collapsing on their occupants, ultimately resulting in more injuries and loss of life.

   Traditional construction on the other hand, being made from lightweight materials, are not designed, or expected, to stand up to these sorts of storms, and so of course get destroyed. But because they’re lightweight, the occupants are in far less danger, and reconstruction afterwards is more a matter of labour, than it is of logistics, supply chains and money.
4. Chooky 4

   16 March 2015 at 9:35 am

   it is also worth reflecting that John Key Nact is giving a couple of million towards the recovery ….and spending about $26 million trying to make New Zealanders change their minds on wanting a new flag…John Key’s pet change the flag project
5. greywarshark 5

   16 March 2015 at 12:56 pm

   There are other organisations offering to help Vanuatu and one of them is Shelterbox centred in Cornwall but with Australian and NZ officials that are set to get into action. Sounds a good and helpful concept.
   http://www.westbriton.co.uk/ShelterBox-dispatch-aid-cyclone-ravaged-Vanuatu/story-26175138-detail/story.html

   Oxfam NZ – Donate at the top of the page and see what they were achieving there
   working with the people.
   http://www.oxfam.org.nz/what-we-do/where-we-work/vanuatu
   Then read this update after the cyclone from Oxfam, Australia.
   https://www.oxfam.org.au/media/2015/03/humanitarian-crisis-in-vanuatu-in-the-aftermath-of-cyclone-pam/

   Caritas Australia has been working in Vanuatu to improve things and probably has had much of its activity swept away. So could do with extra help to go to its workers in the field there.
   http://www.caritas.org.au/learn/countries/vanuatu

   Note that a Red Cross donation which is apparently going to be directed to Vanuatu, may be noted in the reply email as going to support some other purpose! Surprising for a large and long-standing charity like this.

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