Saving Lives with Education and Warnings
Between 1994 to 2013, EM-DAT discovered that during 6,873 natural disasters worldwide, 1.3 million lives were lost. That is almost 68,000 lives on average each year. How many people could have been saved by proper education and warnings? If we get more people to know about this growing problem, many more people can take action and be saved.
Proper communication and understanding may increase the survival chances of those in natural disasters. These proper techniques would have been extremely helpful in Kim Joyce’s case. Joyce wrote about her experience with Hurricane Sandy on a website called Women’s Health. She lived on Staten Island, New York for 15 years. In 2011 right before Hurricane Irene hit, police drove through the neighborhood, blasted their sirens and told everyone to evacuate. So, of course, she started frantically packing and planned to head to her mom’s house. When it was time to go to her mom’s house, she tuned into the news. The TV reporter told everyone to evacuate and that the storm was downgraded to a super-storm. With this new knowledge, she decided that she could wait a while. At about 3:30 pm on October 29, the power in her house was shut down. She thought that this would be the best time to exit her house and make her way to her mother’s house. Before she left to drive around the neighborhood to check out what was going on around them, she checked to see if there was water inside her house. There was none. When her boyfriend, her two cats, and she returned home, the water level was very high around the house. They went back inside of their house. A large wave broke through the wall. With all of the water pressure, they were unable to get through the front door so their only choice was to slip through the boarded up windows. She fit through easily but her boyfriend, Billy, could not. The water was so high that she treaded water. Billy handed her their two cats and told her to swim. She was completely surrounded by water and darkness. She tried to keep her cats above her head. When this was becoming extremely hard, she had to make the hard decision of letting one of her cats go. By doing this, she was able to swim with one hand. Joyce frantically searched for some way that she could get out of the water. She looked up and saw that on the second floor of a nearby house, there were candles. She screamed for help, hoping someone, anyone would hear her. She swam through a broken window of the house that she had just seen and the family in the house told her to come upstairs. She was hysterically crying and wanted to go find Billy, but she was told that if she left, she would die. About four or five hours went by until some firemen rescued them. She was then driven to her mother’s house where she was reunited with her boyfriend. By not getting the proper education and warning, Joyce’s life was in jeopardy.
Kim Joyce's case was one of many. In December 1991, the organization of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) was made to help situations like Joyce's. OCHA’s
mission was to promote preparedness and prevention, facilitated sustainable solutions, advance the rights of people in need, and alleviate human suffering in disasters and emergencies. OCHA has over 30 offices around the world. Their two goals are “improving humanicarianaction in the world’s ongoing crisis” and “increasing the effectiveness of response efforts by engaging with new partners and promoting new technologies and ideas”. To help out this organization, a person can either get one of the many job opportunities and/or contribute money and become a donor. Some of the jobs include being part of the team that helps spread awareness and prevention to the people that help clean up natural disasters. OCHA is one of many organizations that are trying to improve the education and safety of people.
Education and preparedness are necessities of surviving a natural disasters. Getting involved in organizations like OCHA, can help save many lives. The more people know, the more likely they are to be prepared and safe. Imagine how many people could be saved by just simply knowing basic things about natural disasters. So team up and increase the likelihood of survival.
Works Cited
Joyce, Kim. ""I Survived Hurricane Sandy"" Women's Health. Kim Joyce, 18 June 2013.
Web. 02 Mar. 2016.
"OCHA | Coordination Saves Lives." OCHA | Coordination Saves Lives. N.p., n.d. Web.
02 Mar. 2016.
"The Human Cost of Natural Disasters 2015: A Global Perspective."ReliefWeb. N.p., 06
Mar. 2015. Web. 02 Mar. 2016.