Red Cross braces for disaster season

MANILA, Philippines - To speed up rescue and emergency response this “disaster season,” the Philippine National Red Cross (PNRC) is now working to automate its existing information and sharing system.

PNRC chairman Richard Gordon said he met with Smartmatic officials last Thursday and discussed plans to computerize their database and further hasten the deployment of staff and volunteers during disasters.

Gordon said the country’s first automated elections last month served as turning point and prompted him to start planning the modernization of the PNRC’s disaster response operations.

“We intend to automate the existing information and sharing system so that we could conduct faster processing and staff deployment when the need arises,” he said.

Gordon said the PNRC needs to implement the project this rainy season, a time wherein several disasters occur.

“All processes within Red Cross must be able to keep up with the sense of urgency expected from us,” he said, adding that time is very vital in disaster response.

“Time is vital in the nature of our job. It is too important that even a matter of a split-second makes a significant difference,” he said.

The Red Cross chief said he plans to come up with a comprehensive database of all the records in PNRC’s Operation Center, including all the reports from the organization’s local chapters; emergency contact numbers for public reference; and inventory of blood and other equipment and supplies in their warehouse that are available for use or distribution.

“We need a computer that can store all these, so that we can be spared from doing time-consuming manual data search from one file to another, and we can spend more time on matters that need the most attention,” he said.