Georgina Newman: Relief to Pakistan must be well planned

When disaster strikes, especially of the magnitude of Pakistan's earthquake, international aid agencies are ready to act. Most agencies have emergency teams stationed around the globe who are on stand-by and can be deployed with 24 hours of a disaster.

Aid organisations often have long-term programmes in poor, disaster-prone countries. This means they can swing into action within hours, helping with search and rescue and delivering initial supplies of aid to the most needy.

Watching the news in the first hours of a disaster, experienced aid experts will have an instinct about how bad a situation is likely to be. If there is little hard information coming out, it tends to suggest that the emergency is bigger than it first looks.

Not only has the Asian earthquake occurred in a geographically remote region but the epicentre of the quake is also the epicentre of a war zone. Kashmir is a territory disputed by India and Pakistan and southeast Afghanistan is host to a conflict between al Qaeda and the US military.

It is no coincidence that the early reports of this earthquake come from less-affected areas such as the capital cities and not from the epicentre itself.

Those who have survived the disaster and have transport will often surge out of the villages and towns that have been hit. Already badly damaged roads get clogged with people trying to get out. There is a temptation to charge in distributing knee-jerk aid without proper information.

Of course, it is vital to get in aid, and quickly, particularly food, clean water and blankets. But good information and co-ordination is equally important and the key to large-scale success.

Although a bunch of aid workers sitting behind desks while there is urgent need outside looks strange, there are literally hundreds of people wanting to help, from individuals to small local charities and international agencies like the UN. Chaos will ensue if co-ordination is not rigorous.

Different aid agencies are nominated to take the lead in different fields of expertise. In this emergency, Unicef will take the lead on providing water and sanitation and also education and child trauma recovery, the World Food Programme will deliver food, while other aid agencies concentrate on supplying tents or medical support.

In the first 72 hours emphasis will be placed on specialist foreign search and rescue teams. Medical experts estimate an unhurt man can last three days without water and a woman four days. That window of opportunity has now closed and the attention has shifted towards keeping the survivors alive.

Aid workers often refer to the "second emergency", which is the spread of disease.

The Boxing Day tsunami was remarkable in the fact that not one person died from tsunami-related preventable diseases.

Aid workers are keen to repeat this success, and preventing the spread of diseases is now a top priority. Health experts have said malaria and other diseases are already breaking out because of poor living conditions. Hospitals have been destroyed and many doctors and nurses are dead.

The logistic of moving huge amounts of aid within hours is a specialist operation. Unicef has the largest emergency warehouse in the world stationed in Copenhagen - it covers 25,000sq m - the equivalent of three football pitches.

Smaller hubs are strategically placed in Dubai, Panama and Johannesburg. Together they contain emergency supplies to meet the needs of 320,000 people for a total of three weeks.

After years of experience, aid agencies have fine-tuned their approach to preparedness and ability to anticipate problems. The UN estimates the quake has left up to a million people homeless in Pakistan alone, while 3 million more need help, many of them children. It has issued a flash appeal for US$64 million ($90.84 million). In the coming days, clean water, food, shelter and medical supplies will be paramount.

* Georgina Newman is communications manager for Unicef NZ and has worked in many disaster zones.