Where government’s ‘Yolanda’ response fell short

Contrary to some views, the national government was well-prepared for  Supertyphoon “Yolanda.” In fact, the government started preparing days ahead of the typhoon’s arrival, and that was precisely the reason no less than Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin and Interior Secretary Mar Roxas were in Tacloban a day before Yolanda ravaged the Visayas. Indeed, the entire government was on stand-by alert when Yolanda struck.

The difference was in the way the government managed the allocation of resources right after the typhoon. In the first two days, the government’s relief and rescue efforts appeared to be  calibrated; government should have responded with a sweeping, blanket and massive deployment of resources, such as personnel, equipment, relief items and the like.

There were even reports that initial deployment consisted of only 200 policemen because Malacañang did not want to aggravate the logistical problem in Tacloban. It turned out that the small deployment was woefully inadequate as shown by the looting. There was also inadequate deployment of soldiers  in the first two days, resulting in the delayed and slow-paced clearing of roadblocks and retrieval of corpses.

In China, whenever there is a disaster, the government immediately sends to the disaster area a large number of troops, policemen, engineers, rescue personnel, relief items, etc., resulting in prompt, orderly management and resolution of problems concomitant to the disaster.

Next time around, the government should promptly and decisively mobilize resources from nearby regions and deploy them massively in the affected region. Indeed, nothing less than a massive “blitzkrieg” strategy  should be adopted in the devastated areas. For disaster is war. And thus, in meeting head-on future disasters, we have to bear in mind the teachings of military theoreticians like Clausewitz, Nimitz, Sun Tzu, Ho Chi Minh, Chanakya, Eisenhower, Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Attila, Tukhachevsky and others.

–EDWARD B. CONTRERAS,

Cagayan de Oro City