IANS[ THURSDAY, DECEMBER 30, 2004 03:45:33 PM ]
NEW YORK: The United Nations has set a one-year deadline for Asian countries to install a tsunami early warning system even as it made an emergency appeal for $130 million for relief work in tsunami-devastated countries.
Sálvano Briceño, director of the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR), has called for immediate work to install a tsunami early warning system in the Indian Ocean such as already exists in the Pacific.
"Such a system would allow quick evacuation of threatened areas before a tsunami strikes," said Briceno.
ISDR is a UN initiative for increasing knowledge sharing in areas of risk management.
"I want to see that every coastal country around South Asia and Southeast Asia has at least a basic but effective tsunami warning system in place by this time next year," he said in a statement on Thursday.
Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland told a news briefing that the issue of installing early warning systems would be discussed at next month's World Conference on Disaster Reduction in Kobe, Japan.
The UN also issued the first appeal for immediate relief of $130 million.
UN estimates that the undersea earthquake Sunday off Sumatra, Indonesia, which sent the giant waves crashing on to nearly a dozen countries has so far taken toll of 80,000 lives with hundreds of thousands injured too.
"Coordination is now vital. It is one of the biggest relief operations ever," Egeland said of the effort to bring in medicines, shelter, sanitation and water purification equipment to forestall deadly diarrhoeal diseases and acute respiratory infections among the millions of survivors.
The present relief operation is expected to surpass that launched after Hurricane Mitch devastated Central America in 1998, when the $155 million flash appeal for relief for the first six months was followed by a "mammoth" longer-term reconstruction effort undertaken by the UN and the World Bank.
"I think this will be bigger and as such it is unprecedented," Egeland said.
Egeland said overall donations pledged so far included some $220 million in cash and an equal amount in kind, some of which would help cover the $130 million emergency call issued.
Secretary-General Kofi Annan is expected to launch the much vaster flash appeal for the next six months on Jan 6.
According to figures released by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the two largest UN flash appeals to date have been $1.6 billion for Iraq following last year's war and $350 million for the earthquake in Bam, Iran, a year ago.
No comments:
Post a Comment