Disaster Strikes Syria & Turkey
According to USGS, “On February 6, 2023, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake occurred in southern Turkey near the northern border of Syria. The earthquake occurred at a shallow depth of 18 km (11 miles). The USGS PAGER impact report is RED for Economic Losses and Orange for Fatalities, indicating extensive damage is probable, the disaster is likely widespread, and significant casualties are likely. The earthquake was followed 11 minutes later by a magnitude 6.7 aftershock.”
The media likes to give numbers, but in the initial hours of a catastrophe fatalities are absurdly difficult to assess. While several thousand are already reported dead, several thousand buildings are also reported to have collapsed… which leads us to conclude there will be hundreds or thousands more fatalities. Obviously there will be many injuries, too… happening in the middle of a catastrophe where infrastructure is out and systems were already stressed.
They will need help.
Inevitably, people want to send things to a disaster area to “help.”
It’s not helpful. Don’t do it.
I’m rarely adamant and bossy in posts (I hope), but after years of working in disaster management, I’m comfortable being adamant about this one. And yet people will contort themselves into all kinds of justifications for sending stuff to a catastrophe area instead of money. It’s even more absurd when the disaster is in a remote area where logistical challenges would have been difficult even before the crisis.
It’s better to send money to help, and to send it to well-established, large disaster response organizations with established logistics and supply chains. A big organization has the capacity to overcome the logistical challenges of getting into disaster-impacted and/or remote areas. It is better to donate through an established group’s website than through a GoFundMe or other fundraising source that can’t be verified.
More About Why
In this case, sending aid through established groups is particularly critical because the crisis is occurring in a war-torn area where there are already refugees. There should be aid organizations already in place to a certain extent… those organizations will need more support as their operations will have been heavily impacted, too. They will also already know what supplies and equipment they need to operate in their already-stressed location.
In the US when there’s a crisis, people send stuff to disasters and it inevitably ends up in giant, moldy mounds in warehouses. It’s better to donate your stuff locally to groups that collect used goods such as your old winter clothes. Don’t try to get them sent in a shipping container to a remote disaster area across the sea.
In an international crisis like this, one of the challenges for those on the ground will be getting the aid in to the area, and to people who can use it. We can imagine that a lot of the infrastructure will be out and will affect people trying to get there to help… which could include damaged roads. Oftentimes due to road and bridge damage, resources can only be brought in by air — and then to very limited runways or landing zones. Therefore, what can be brought in is often triaged.
For example, in the god-awful Haiti earthquake in 2009, the piers were damaged and it’s an island… so the only aid that could be brought in for months was via air… to a very limited airfield. Thousands of planes were turned away because there was no space for them, or for their cargo.
In international crises like this one, there will be aid coming from around the world. In this crisis, the Biden Administration has already promised a humanitarian aid response from the US government. There is a budget for this, and a whole set-up for it in the US Department of Defense. I had the great honor of working on some after-action work on these processes in 2010. They have impressive capabilities, and they are used to working with both domestic and international aid organizations.
Despite that, no doubt Republicans will raise holy hell that we are helping people in need — once again. Helping humans in a humanitarian crisis is the right thing to do, for one thing. Also, the thing about being the world’s superpower is that soft aid like catastrophe help also helps your country maintain primacy in the world. There’s value to being the world’s helper. But valuing that means you have to think a bit strategically about what’s best for the US and for the world as a whole.
It seems to me that one value Americans have held for decades is that we do like to help out in a humanitarian crisis. Whether we get to do so in the future will depend on how much hold Republicans have on government. We made the argument here just yesterday that taking care of humans should be a political priority. If we’re looking for domestic things we can do to help, I think talking about that is a big one — that it’s important to take care of people. This nonprofit here is planning to do work in that area… helping us put those values more front and center.
I don’t have specific recommendations for organizations to send financial aid to as my expertise is in domestic disaster response. I do use the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (NVOAD) list as a starting point as there is some overlap. A few groups do both domestic and international response, but international disaster specialty groups have different skillset, logistics, and operating parameters than domestic groups do.
Thank you for reading, and for passing this word along to people who might like to help out with this humanitarian crisis. Be safe and be well.