Workers in the Colombo, Sri Lanka, airport Friday process aid supplies sent from countries all over the world. People and equipment from the Disaster Resource Network, an alliance of global companies that mobilizes when disaster strikes, are helping U.S. Marines at the airport organize and move incoming relief aid to avoid a backlog of supplies. (Jim Schulz / S&S)
Workers in the Colombo, Sri Lanka, airport Friday process aid supplies sent from countries all over the world. People and equipment from the Disaster Resource Network, an alliance of global companies that mobilizes when disaster strikes, are helping U.S. Marines at the airport organize and move incoming relief aid to avoid a backlog of supplies. (Jim Schulz / S&S)
Workers from the Disaster Resource Network load relief supplies onto a U.S. Pave Hawk helicopter at Colombo Airport in Sri Lanka on Friday. (Jim Schulz / S&S)
Workers move relief supplies that are passing through the Colombo, Sri Lanka, airport on the way to victims of the South Asia tsunamis. (Jim Schulz / S&S)
A Sri Lankan worker wraps disaster relief supplies with cellophane at the Colombo airport on Friday. (Jim Schulz / S&S)
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — As U.S. military forces plug ahead with a relief plan in tsunami-wracked Sri Lanka, a collaboration of private companies set up after another devastating natural disaster is helping ensure tons of aid relief is moving in and out of the main airport smoothly.
After a deadly earthquake on Dec. 26, 2003, in Bam, Iran, shipping giant DHL began transporting planes of aid to the local airport there. Supplies quickly backed up.
“We decided to put a team together instead of donating more planes and adding to the chaos,” said Chris Weeks, a DHL employee who heads the Airport Emergency Team set up at the Colombo airport. “We decided to put this together.”
DHL and several other companies from around the world formed the Disaster Resource Network, an organization that would, in times of crisis, move in and help with logistics, transportation and communications. In Sri Lanka, the Airport Emergency Team coordinates and processes tons of incoming supplies.
As aid arrives, a team of 12 assisted by local workers moves it, organizes it, processes it and sends it out on military and civilian aircraft, Weeks said.
The system utilizes the business practices of its member companies and brings in skilled laborers such as forklift operators. It’s safer and more efficient than disaster relief operations of the past, Weeks said. The key, he adds, is arriving quickly, before operations can back up.
“We couldn’t have reacted as quickly as we did (without the team already in place),” Weeks said. “You have to get here within three days. We got here just in the nick of time.”
In the first week, the team moved 2,600 tons of aid from 47 countries. Much of it goes out in U.S. Air Force Pave Hawk helicopters and Canadian and American military cargo planes, while some is transported by Sri Lankan government agencies and nongovernmental agencies, Weeks said.
U.S. Marines conducting logistics and airport control operations at the airport, from the Combined Logistics Control Center, assist the Airport Emergency Team with lifting, among other tasks, as they wait for their full-scale relief operations to begin.
“We help them in any way that we can,” said Staff Sgt. Claude Pile of the Landing Support Company of the 3rd Transportation Support Battalion in Okinawa and staff noncommissioned officer for the control center.
Week’s team now is sending representatives to countries in the disaster areas where supplies have backed up, such as in Indonesia, to help assist operations there.
They also have begun adding better processing technology using wireless Internet connections so as a plane lands, someone can record arrival information and transmit it throughout the airport warehouse and back to the company or country the plane came from.
The team has seen some logistical obstacles, but most of the relief is at least flowing out, Weeks said.
“We’re giving it a fighting chance to get out there,” he said.
