This month marked the fifth anniversary of the establishment of the emergency operations center at the Philippine Disaster Resilience Foundation (PDRF) in Clark, Pampanga. I can remember clearly the paradigm-shift which led us to create this center. From 2009 onwards, when PDRF was first established following Typhoon “Ondoy” (international name: Ketsana), we had primarily focused on relief and recovery efforts after a natural disaster. But in 2013, when Supertyphoon “Yolanda” (international name: Haiyan) hit the Philippines, we realized that we needed to shift gears and focus on disaster preparedness, prevention, and mitigation. At that time, Yolanda was the strongest-ever storm in world history to make landfall. It caused widespread damage from Visayas to Palawan, causing the deaths of over 6,000 people (though this was considered a conservative estimate), $12 billion in damage, and 14.1 million displaced people.
The outpouring of support and assistance from around the world and the country was unprecedented. Billions of dollars and thousands of people from all over the world came to help. The Philippine private sector under PDRF mobilized resources and technical assistance across all 21 identified “zones” or areas hardest hit, helping rebuild houses, schools, hospitals, stores, ports, infrastructure, and other structures. However, we realized that we could not afford to undergo another such massive exercise of rebuilding after every storm and typhoon.
We knew that with 20 to 25 storms a year plus earthquakes and volcanic eruptions to contend with, we had to figure out a way to prepare ourselves and prevent or minimize loss of life and property. At that time, we had no way of knowing that we would be hit by COVID in 2020, but we certainly realized that a public health risk such as an epidemic posed a realistic risk for the country.
Thus, by early 2014, as reconstruction and recover work for Yolanda was well underway, we began to plan how to build an emergency operations center. With the PDRF board of trustees reorganized and expanded after Yolanda, led by PLDT/Smart chair Manuel V. Pangilinan, Ayala chair Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala, and Cardinal Luis Antonio “Chito” Tagle, we created a task force to focus on the emergency operations center.
We started the design process counterintuitively, working with outside experts on our “concept of operations” and “incident command system” to build up processes, protocols, and skills before we even began designing the physical center. We used this time to build up staff skills and learn more about mapping software, something we knew we had to develop so we could become better at scenario planning and forecasting.
We started researching how operations centers were designed, staffed, and operated in different parts of the world. We met with many experts, including people who had run operations centers, reconstruction operations, and weather services. Our research took us to places like Brisbane and Canberra, Australia, to tour state and federal centers, Wellington, New Zealand, and San Francisco to look at city-managed centers, and Jakarta to see Asean’s regional humanitarian center.
Once we felt we had learned enough, we built a small prototype center in Makati to test all our lessons and insights. We ran this center for two years, monitoring and activating for storms and working on tabletop exercises and physical drills. As we were running this prototype center, we began to look for locations to design and build our eventual operations center. One key consideration was to locate outside Metro Manila to minimize risk against the “Big One,” a potential 7.2-magnitude earthquake in the National Capital Region which could effectively divide Metro Manila into four stand-alone quadrants. But we also wanted to be near a good airport, port, and with access to good highways.
For these reasons, we quickly decided on Clark. We identified three potential sites and settled on one and began working with the architectural firm W.V Coscolluela and Associates. We selected a single-story, American-period public school building and refurbished its interiors into an emergency operations center without making structural changes to the building. This building was inaugurated in April 2018 and contains our command post, training room, library and resource hub, offices, boardroom, and lounge. The building can operate on a 24/7 basis during natural disasters and accommodate up to 100 people in emergency operations.
This emergency operations center represents our initial, modest steps in our road to resilience for the country. Since its inauguration five years ago, it has been activated for every major typhoon, earthquake, volcanic eruption, and pandemic in the country. The journey continues.
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Guillermo M. Luz is chief resilience officer of the Philippine Disaster Resilience Foundation (pdrf.org).
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