Pacific Disaster Center, headquartered in South Maui, is providing technical assistance to Vietnam as the Southeast Asian nation works to improve its disaster management capabilities.For about 200 years, the island of Maui has played second fiddle to Honolulu. When the measure is something like population, traffic or skyscrapers, Maui is probably glad not to be in the running for first. However, if the subject is disaster management, Pacific Disaster Center (PDC) has pretty much made Maui a world capital along with Geneva, Switzerland, primary hive of United Nations activity; Boulder, Colorado, home of America’s Natural Hazards Center; and Jakarta, Indonesia, center of cooperation in disaster management for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. The Kihei-based organization, which has become a leader, as they say, in “fostering disaster-resilient communities,” is expanding in several directions to save lives and economies around the Pacific and beyond.
“Between January of this year, when senior PDC scientists were in Thailand,” said Executive Director Ray Shirkhodai, “through the end of July when we had staff members in Kaua‘i, Lahaina, Honolulu, Bali, Padang, and Guam, pretty much all at the same time, we traveled to 20 different nations and territories. We’ve been engaged in work all over the Pacific, across the Caribbean and on five continents, not to mention conferences and presentations all over the U.S. Mainland, in Europe, and really, around the world.” In that same period, PDC managers and staff traveled to Vietnam several times and hosted Vietnamese visitors on Maui.
PDC has become committed to helping enhance disaster management systems and practices in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, where about 86 million people live on just over 128,000 square miles of river-striped terrain that is battered, annually, by numerous tropical cyclones. To that end, PDC has been collaborating for several years on various projects and studies, including two major international workshops that brought experts from across the Asia Pacific region to share their experiences with Vietnamese scientists and disaster executives.
The natural hazards that plague Vietnam are mostly related to storms sweeping inland from the Pacific. This includes direct damage done by rain and wind, as well as widespread destruction caused by the resultant flooding and landslides. The PDC-organized workshops in Vietnam were about appropriate methods for coping with landslide threats and about best practices for hazards such as widespread flooding.
In April, PDC signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Vietnamese Academy of Science and Technology (VAST), formalizing a years-long relationship dedicated to providing the country with internationally proven best practices, and establishing a framework for additional years of cooperation. One concept behind this MoU was that, in time, with the help of PDC, Vietnam could have the hardware, software, systems and training needed to foresee hazards, make informed decisions about responses, issue early warnings to those in danger and otherwise manage the nation’s natural hazards.
In May, as a follow-up to the PDC-VAST MoU signing, Shirkhodai and Chief Information Officer Chris Chiesa, along with University of Hawai‘i Vice President of Information Technology David Lassner traveled to Vietnam to meet with representatives of VAST, including Deputy Director of International Cooperation Nguyen Gia Lap and directors and senior representatives from four of the 30 or more institutes within VAST. This trip was planned around the signing of another, equally important MoU—with Vietnam’s Water Resources University (WRU).
The event was attended by dozens of people representing government agencies and ministries, as well as representatives of the U.S. Embassy, U.S. Agency for International Development, U.S. Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) and The World Bank. Chiesa provided a presentation detailing PDC’s recent and planned activities in Vietnam, a profile of which can be found online at www.pdc.org/iweb/projectvietnam.jsp?subg=5. Ms. Pham Hong Nga provided an overview of current WRU activities and programs at their Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City campuses, as well as planned expansions of the Hanoi Campus, noting that WRU has over 10,000 students at its various campuses.
With the signing of the PDC-WRU MoU, the principals were able to undertake productive discussion of the details of past and proposed projects. They convened for these talks in the brand new office of Pacific Disaster Center in Vietnam, a space provided by WRU specifically to support planned PDC activities in Vietnam under USTDA and World Bank funding, for which the proposals are under active review. Chiesa said, “The comfortable, spacious office is equipped with all the necessary furnishings, as well as phones and fax to support ongoing and planned activities of PDC and our partners in Vietnam.”
PDC has already developed a multi-source map viewer to provide Vietnam’s disaster managers with Web-accessible visualizations of historic and current hazards. The Maui organization has also conducted a pilot project to demonstrate the applicability of internationally accepted best practices to Vietnam’s ongoing effort to manage flooding. Now, USTDA has given the nod to a major project to provide the country with state-of-the-art, high-tech decision support tools, which, once installed, can be developed to support disaster managers in the full range of planning, decision making and early warnings.
The upcoming PDC-Vietnam collaboration will put that new office space at WRU-Hanoi to good use for at least a year. In the meantime, Maui’s own Pacific Disaster Center—with offices on O‘ahu and a continuing presence in Bangkok—is now in Vietnam, too. Beyond that, anything is possible.