Setting standards for USAR
The influx of USAR teams at a disaster can actually hamper response. Arjun Katoch describes new guidelines for categorising USAR teams to help overwhelmed co-ordinators.
For years, international disaster managers responding to earthquakes bemoaned the multiplicity and wide range of professional capability, or lack of, amongst responders who arrive on the scene professing to be USAR teams. Resources such as transport, interpreters, lumber and oxyacetylene gasses are in short supply in an area recently struck by a major disaster and should, obviously, be allocated to those USAR teams with the most useful operational capability.
In most cases, the government of the affected country, as well as the Local Emergency Management Authority, having requested international assistance, has no knowledge of the actual or professed capabilities of those who arrive and cannot take the politically risky step of turning a ‘USAR team’ back.
New guidelines by the International Search and Rescue Advisory Group (INSARAG), the apex body for international urban search and rescue with its Secretariat housed in the United Nations, aim to empower the authorities of the disaster affected country with a tool, which enables them to prioritise resource allocation with minimal domestic political risk.
The full text appears in Volume 3 Issue 1 of the Crisis Response Journal.
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