Audio Updates from Relief Specialist

Posted: 22 August 2007

Frank Boeren, relief specialist with Oxfam International, provides an update of our assessment and plans to deliver aid to two affected rural districts: Humay and Independencia.

English/Ingles (MP3)
Spanish/Español (MP3)

Transcript

It's now almost a week past the earthquake that hit on Wednesday, August 15th, in the evening. This week has served to obtain a clearer picture of the amount of damage and the exact areas that were affected. The numbers of dead, of injuries, and destroyed houses; we're now talking about 33,000 houses destroyed as a whole. Initially there were rumors and no reliable information available about potentially additional areas that ... from which telephone conversation were possible. Oxfam organized a helicopter [flying over] ... some of the adjacent Andes areas and came to the conclusion that in some of these villages visible damage was there but the number of people who were sleeping outside their houses, who's houses were too severely affected, was really limited to a handful in a large number of these villages. In conclusion, Oxfam has decided to concentrate its own efforts in two rural districts that are in the coastal valley outside the city of Pisco along the Pisco river at about 20 and 35 mi. outside the city.

We will be serving, initially, 1,500 families with a combination of ... water, sanitation and public health on the one hand and temporary shelter on the other. Given the circumstances in these rural districts we will not be working through makeshift shelters, camps; rather the situation allows for tents or temporary housing, sort of in the backyard of their destroyed houses and little by little we will be able to recycle materials and rebuild their houses.

For the first three months we will be focusing on those 1,500 families in those two rural districts. On top of that we are considering interventions in urban, larger tent camps as well and that's specifically on water and sanitation. This is hinging on the establishments of a few minimal conditions in terms of the organization of those camps, the provisioning of tents, and a clear agreement with the government about the quality standards that have to be complied because, as Oxfam, there are a number of quality standards in aid delivery that are non-negotiable.

Saturday the 25th of August we will have an aircraft arriving from the United Kingdom that carries 40 metric tons of relief supplies including 450 tents, 1,000 buckets for families, latrine floors, several water tanks of varying size. We have combined that with one tanker truck that has been given to Oxfam ... by a private enterprise wanting to help. That truck will be carrying water to needy places starting tomorrow morning. So we perceive that early next week ... we will be engaged in massive delivery of those tents, water and sanitation items, latrines, on to the 1,500 families that we have targeted in the two rural districts of Humay and Independencia, respectively.