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Flood mock exercise triggers disaster preparedness

By Buddhi Kumal On 13.06.2018 Influence & ImpactBlog

Disaster preparedness is crucial for prevention of losses and successful coping as well as building community flood resilience. Better preparedness ensures reduced loss of people, their assets and livelihoods. Building on the end to end flood early warning systems Practical Action has been helping communities in its projects to adopt ‘flood mock exercise’ as an approach to self-test the capacity to respond floods and institutionalise disaster preparedness at all levels in Nepal.

Day of nationally coordinated action

On 5 June 2018, while world marked environment day, flood vulnerable communities organised flood mock exercise to ensure they are ready to upcoming monsoon rains and potential flood they would generate. Generally, monsoon rains start by 10 June in Nepal. Therefore, the day is much appropriate to test the preparation and ensure everything is in place. On this day, community disaster management committee (CDMC) at grassroots level performs and leads different actions as a part of preparedness such as testing of risk information sharing devices/techniques, practicing of rescuing people at risk, providing first aid service, bringing people and their assets to safe place, informing local security personnel, serving dry foods among others and so forth activating available humanitarian clusters and coordination mechanism. These actions are linked to national level flood forecasting, monitoring and communication abilities. It’s truly a nationally coordinated action.

Joining hands with local governments to initiate more actions on disaster preparedness

Flood vulnerable communities coordinate with local government including emergency service providers for flood mock exercise. The local security forces perform flood mock exercise in collaboration with community people. Local governments joined flood vulnerable people in the exercise. This helped local governments understand community initiatives and institutionalise the flood preparedness actions during monsoon. The local governments determines the most flood vulnerable communities and takes decisions to perform flood mock exercises. Later on, after review of flood mock exercises, local government officials move on for further preparedness.

A wake up call for all

Flood mock exercise brings together all level DRR stakeholders together for single objective in common platform. Agencies responsible for risk monitoring, generating risk information and disseminating it to respective people and DRR actors has to work in in close coordination and collaboration. It is so interdependent that every agency should awaken to complete their tasks and provide and pass on the support to next. In Nepal, Department of Hydrology and Meteorology (DHM) is responsible to monitor flood risk and provide it to Emergency Operation Centers and other agencies. They monitor different systems and generate rainfall and flood risk information for different time period in defined river basins in flood early warning system. The other DRR agencies then, act on the available information. The information is shared and disseminated through defined diverse communication channels such as online bulletins, social media, telephones, text messages, FM radios, sirens and volunteers visiting door to door.

During mock exercise, these all agencies and the community have opportunity to test the ability and functionality of the system they work in. Nepal’s largest private sector telecom Ncell have volunteered to send text messages to their subscribers in the area decided by the DHM or MoHA. The EOCs who are working on behalf of Ministry of Home Affairs mobilized a team to disseminate risk information messages and district government decisions as District Disaster Management Committee (DDMC) decisions.

Building community flood resilience
This is an innovative strategy for disaster risk reduction promoting institutionalization of good practices and checking preparedness in time at the face of upcoming flood risks. Bringing everybody together it reveals the need of joint actions; the largest training for everybody useful to life saving. The communities lead the response supported by all around at local to international using modest technologies. It is small, simplified and very important. Truly beautiful!

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