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Helping Peru Recover from a Devastating Earthquake
(English * Espaņol) October 2007
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Peruvian children enjoy their new temporary shelter after the massive earthquake. |
The evening of August 15, 2007, people throughout Peru felt the ground beneath them jolt as a magnitude 8.0 earthquake struck the country. Streets cracked open, buildings caved in and houses crumbled.
The devastating temblor killed 519 people and injured at least 1,844 others, according to the Peruvian National Institute of Civil Defense (INDECI), which estimated 52,891 houses were destroyed and another 22,939 damaged.
Cities and towns in southern Peru were the hardest hit. More than 500,000 people live within 60 miles of the epicenter, which was located near Pisco, a seaside city about 150 miles south of Lima.
Immediately following the earthquake, Peruvian President Alan García arrived in Pisco to take charge of the government’s operational and public response to the disaster. Observers praised the Government of Peru for responding to the massive quake with incredible swiftness. Nonetheless, as the dust settled, it
became clear that the damage was both widespread and severe, and international assistance would be welcome.
More than 50 staff members of the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Peru, the agency’s Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (USAID/ OFDA), and the U.S. Department of Defense’s Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) traveled to affected areas to conduct assessments, provide emergency medical care, and distribute relief supplies to affected residents.
Through USAID/OFDA, the U.S. Government immediately donated $100,000 to the Peruvian Red Cross for the local procurement of emergency supplies, and on Aug. 21 flew 15,000 wool blankets from its warehouse in Miami, Florida, to hand out to Peruvian families in need. Other relief commodities airlifted to Peru in the following days included four 10,000-liter water bladders, 7,800 ten-liter water containers and 1,600 rolls of plastic sheeting for temporary shelters.
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Volunteer firefighters in Peru received USAID/ OFDA funding to help build temporary shelters. |
During the next two months, U.S. government assistance to Peru reached nearly $3.2 million, including $2.6 million in USAID/OFDA assistance and another $600,000 from the U.S. Department of Defense, which sent medical teams, a portable laboratory, a 27-member field surgical team, an operating room package and medical supplies to Peru.
In the initial response phase, USAID/OFDA focused on distributing items for use by households, such as blankets and water receptacles.
“The disaster affected significant urban areas – cities of 50,000 to 80,000 inhabitants. Lack of water was a big problem because urban water systems were either destroyed by the earthquake or shut down by authorities to avoid the risk of contamination from sewer lines,” said USAID/OFDA Regional Advisor Phil Gelman, who traveled to Peru the morning after the earthquake.
After the initial response period, which lasted about two weeks, USAID assessment teams concluded the main emergency needs in earth-quake-affected areas were water and sanitation, temporary shelters and rubble removal.
Providing Shelter
Tens of thousands of houses had fallen down during the quake because they were made of unimproved adobe.
“They didn’t have columns. The adobe used is not like their ancestors’ adobe buildings. There was not a lot of hay or vegetation in it. It was just bricks made from mud. When it started to shake, the houses just crumbled,” Gelman said. “Shelter issues were clearly important, so we decided to focus on two major areas: shelter and water.”
Toward that end, USAID/OFDA signed grant agreements with humanitarian organizations CARE, Caritas and World Vision on Aug. 23, and two weeks later with Save the Children. These grants provide cash and reinforced plastic sheeting to the organizations to assist thousands of families in building temporary shelters in Cañete, Chincha, Ica and Yauyos provinces.
As a result of these agreements, some 4,300 temporary shelters (each a 16-square-meter structure of reinforced plastic sheeting over a wooden frame), are expected to be built by the beginning of December.
“The implementing partners are responsible for helping people put up the shelters and finding sanitation solutions – whether that means reattaching to the municipal sewer system or, if that’s not possible, a latrine of some kind,” Gelman said.
A novel feature of the grants to CARE ($367,500), Caritas ($317,500) and World Vision ($400,000) is that they include sub-grants for the Peruvian Corps of Voluntary Firefighters, an organization with which USAID/OFDA has a longstanding relationship.
“Even though they are not a paid cadre, Peru’s volunteer firefighters are the most consistent partner of OFDA’s Training and Technical Assistance Program. They call themselves “hijos de OFDA” (“sons of OFDA”). They’ve institutionalized USAID/OFDA training; it’s a fun-damental part of being a bombero in Peru,” Gelman said.
The sub-grant arrangement means each im-plementing partner provides funds to the Peruvian Corps of Voluntary Firefighters for support putting up temporary shelters. In all, there’s funding for 40 firefighters to receive a stipend for a two-month period, as well as money to cover logistical expenses.
“These are firefighters from the region, who have themselves been affected. They are locals working in their own communities to resolve the problem. It’s a win-win situation, and makes for a productive and interesting relationship with the NGOs. That’s the most innovative and interesting component of the USAID/OFDA grants,” Gelman said.
Clearing Away the Rubble
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Peruvian residents try to get on with their lives amid piles of rubble from the quake. |
While helping address people’s need for shelter, the USAID/OFDA team noticed another problem that wasn’t going away – rubble.
“People recycled a good amount – doors, windows, anything recyclable was reused. Still, much of what was left was rubble. After the quake, people began removing the rubble from their property and putting it into the streets in response to the government’s “Lote Limpio” program. This was an effort to get displaced people back onto their own lots instead of having them live in shelter camps. It was a great program, but it resulted in all the rubble being piled into the streets,” Gelman said.
With no solution in sight, USAID/OFDA decided to add a provision to its grant agreements to address the issue of rubble, as the debris was delaying efforts in shelter activities as well as in the recovery and reconstruction phases.
“Rubble removal was a huge issue. For a variety of reasons, it was happening very slowly,” Gelman said. USAID/OFDA gave additional funds to CARE, Caritas and World Vision (Save the Children made its own provision) so they could hire trucks and heavy machinery to remove and dispose of the rubble.
“There’s two reasons why this is a good idea. One, it is practical – you can get in and out of your lot. Two, from a psychological viewpoint… recovery is slower if you have to climb out of your temporary shelter and over the remains of what was once your home, your life, your family history… all taken by a few minutes of shaking. It’s difficult to move on if the vestiges of the past are still there,” Gelman explained.
Looking to the Future
Acknowledging the needs are greater than the resources available to USAID/OFDA, the assessment team decided to continue focusing its efforts in the area of housing. A logical continuation of the temporary shelter efforts was to begin looking at the issue of permanent housing, Gelman said.
“At first, discussion within the government seemed to be: ‘adobe is bad; let’s not give any assistance to rebuild adobe houses.’ But a closer look at the issue revealed two things. One, real brick-and-mortar houses are beyond the means of most of the affected people; and two, there’s been a lot of work done in Peru toward improving traditional adobe building techniques. Our concern was that these improvements – such as adding in mats woven out of hay, a layer of cement between the bricks, etc. – wouldn’t see the light of day if adobe was viewed as valueless,” he explained.
On September 28, USAID/OFDA awarded a $50,000 grant to the Economic and Social Investigation Consortium to support a participatory process for the development of a strategic plan for housing reconstruction. By that time, two somewhat parallel tracks of strategizing had developed. One, headed by NGOs and other civil society actors, was focused on identifying essential practical steps toward housing reconstruction, both from a technical point of view – dissemination of improvements on traditional building methods, for example – as well as from the implementation side. This group includes the Universidad Católica, which has done a lot of nuts-and-bolts work to improve adobe building techniques. The other approach, coordinated by the Economic and Social Investigation Consortium, was centered more on policy level questions regarding housing.
“We wanted to help these two initiatives converge to come up with some sort of plan for social housing reconstruction and associated sanitation issues,” Gelman said. “I think the endeavor is pretty exciting and I hope it sticks together.”
Further aiding efforts to address key reconstruction issues, Chuck Setchell, USAID/ OFDA’s Shelter, Settlements and Mitigation Advisor, plans to travel to Peru from November 4-14 to attend a seminar designed to bring together civil society and government actors to discuss housing reconstruction strategy and policy. Setchell will advise seminar participants based on lessons learned from reconstruction efforts in other countries.
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