Shelter from the storm - PASSA

I've heard newborn babies wailing like a mourning dove
And old men with broken teeth stranded without love
Do I understand your question man is it hopeless and forlorn
"Come in" she said
"I'll give you shelter from the storm".

Vietnam, Bangladesh, Fiji, Indonesia, India, Ethiopia, Nepal, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives are the countries I have been involved with shelter: temporary, transitional and permanent for nigh on four decades..

Was it Bob Dylan's song of the 60's that got me involved in shelter, Shelter from the storm ?

Then I met an Angel.

Well it certainly was my French heroine, Corinne Treherne, who oversaw the construction of 20,000 high quality transitional shelters after the Tsunami in Aceh,  who gave me new meaning of 'shelter from the storm' for 100,000 plus people. Was she the type of woman Dylan may have been singing about? This is an article I wrote about Corinne in mid-2008. http://bobmckerrow.blogspot.com/2008/05/french-red-cross-heroine.html

Corinne Treherne, the International Federation transitional shelter programme coordinator hands a present to children's beneficiares during the closing ceremony of the programme in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, 2008,.


In IFRC we have been working hard to improve our approach to shelter and in this respect, Corinne Treherne, together with Sandra D'Urzo  from the IFRC Shelter department in Geneva, have made the video above which is on YouTube and is about PASSA (Participatory Approach to Safe Shelter Awareness) tool. Whether you live in Dhaka Bangladesh or Christchurch,  New Zealabd, you can learn a lot of basic information from the video above about community participation.
Already in Christchurch I hear politicians making decisions about the people's city without  consultation or participation. This is a recipe for another disaster.. 

PASSA is a recently developed, community driven planning tool for shelter based on the participatory approach used in other red Cross programmes.

The 2nd pilot for PASSA was conducted in Bangladesh and the Bangladesh Red Crescent Society found it a very useful tool for assessment and planning, complementing the Vulnerability and Capacity assessment tool, and included PASSA in the community development initiatives.

Corinne Treherne
Some of us have had the privilege to come across this amazingly skilled women who can communicate and implement shelter with communities in our humanitarian work. An old woman who received a house from her after the Tsunami in indonesia described her as an 'Angel." Corinne Treherne,from France, has made the greatest impression on me in the last decade, maybe even three decades.. She is my modern day Joan of What an achievement! Bringing  teams together and training them to assist her construct 20,000 houses and giving 100,000 people a home after the devastating tsunami which killed over 170,000 people in Indonesia on 24 December 2004.

. One of the 20,000 houses that Corinne supervised the construction of.

. Photo: Bob McKerrow IFRC

Early in 2008, the International Federation’s landmark transitional shelter programme in Aceh came to a close, with the last of the almost 20,000 shelters being completed on remote Simeulue Island.

.Back to the YouTube video above:  The video, documented during the pilot in Bangladesh, illustrates the step by step PASSA methodology to provide the most user-friendly visual support to get familiar with its contents.

This video is an initiative of the Shelter & Settlements Dept and Communications & Media Dept, co-funded by the Global Shelter Programme and the British Red Cross. The Bangladesh RC have been closely involved in the development of the video and the content, and were instrumental in enabling the site visits and interviews..

This video is one of a series of similar products we have been developing over time to communicate to a wider internal and external audience the breadth of shelter and settlement issues from the perspective of the Red Cross/red Crescent Movement.

Having a house in Christchurch, being a ratepayer in Christchurch, having family and friends in Christchurch, my advice to planners  is look at temporary or transitional shelter. You have Peter Cameron from the Ministry of Civil Defence who worked in the Tsunami in Indonesia, Elizabeth McNaughton with NZAID who knows shelter well through her Tsunami work in the Maldives, and understands shelter, and Jerry Talbot from the New Zealand red Cross who was head of the IFRC Tsunami unit during the Tsunami. Use these talenmted people wisely. Christchurch is keeping people healthy through Portaloo's, temporary toilets, the authorities need to look at Portahouses, whether campervans, makeshift/transitional shelters of one form in another, as it will be years before all damaged or destroyed homes are rebuilt.

People need to be consulted about how their communities and houses are rebuilt, and transitional solutions need to examined while people are given time to build back better.


"Shelter From The Storm"


I was in another lifetime one of toil and blood

When blackness was a virtue and the road was full of mud

I came in from the wilderness a creature void of form

"Come in" she said

"I'll give you shelter from the storm".



And if I pass this way again you can rest assured

I'll always do my best for her on that I give my word

In a world of steel-eyed death and men who are fighting to be warm

"Come in" she said

"I'll give you shelter from the storm".



Not a word was spoke between us there was little risk involved

Everything up to that point had been left unresolved

Try imagining a place where it's always safe and warm

"Come in" she said

"I'll give you shelter from the storm".



I was burned out from exhaustion buried in the hail

Poisoned in the bushes and blown out on the trail

Hunted like a crocodile ravaged in the corn

"Come in" she said

"I'll give you shelter from the storm".



Suddenly I turned around and she was standing there

With silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair

She walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns

"Come in" she said

"I'll give you shelter from the storm".



Now there's a wall between us something there's been lost

I took too much for granted got my signals crossed

Just to think that it all began on a long-forgotten morn

"Come in" she said

"I'll give you shelter from the storm".



Well the deputy walks on hard nails and the preacher rides a mount

But nothing really matters much it's doom alone that counts

And the one-eyed undertaker he blows a futile horn

"Come in" she said

"I'll give you shelter from the storm".

I've heard newborn babies wailing like a mourning dove

And old men with broken teeth stranded without love

Do I understand your question man is it hopeless and forlorn

"Come in" she said

"I'll give you shelter from the storm".



In a little hilltop village they gambled for my clothes

I bargained for salvation and they gave me a lethal dose

I offered up my innocence and got repaid with scorn

"Come in" she said

"I'll give you shelter from the storm".



Well I'm living in a foreign country but I'm bound to cross the line

Beauty walks a razor's edge someday I'll make it mine

If I could only turn back the clock to when God and her were born

"Come in" she said

"I'll give you shelter from the storm".

Christchurch quake mapped from space shows why earthquake occured.

My good friend Brian Taylor who died in the earthquake taught science and ran Science Alive in Christchurch for more than a decade. Brian would have loved to have seen these wonderful images which would have partially satisfied his insatiable appetite to learn more about what makes things tick.
If you want to see an amzing array of earthquake photographs, go to Colin Monteath's website. http://www.colinmonteath.com/Colin_Monteath/New_image_displays/Entries/2011/3/7_The_day_Christchurch_stopped...22nd_February_2011_-_earthquake!.html

The upheaval wrought by the 22 February earthquake in Christchurch, NZ, is illustrated in new radar imagery.

The Magnitude 6.3 tremor killed more than 160 people and shattered a city already reeling from a previous seismic event in September.

Data from the Japanese Alos spacecraft has been used to map the way the ground deformed during the most recent quake.

It shows clearly that the focus of the tremor was right under the city's south-eastern suburbs.

The type of image displayed on this page is known as a synthetic aperture radar interferogram.
It is made by combining a sequence of radar images acquired by an orbiting satellite "before" and "after" a quake.

The technique allows very precise measurements to be made of any ground motion that takes place between the image acquisitions.

The coloured bands, or fringes, represent movement towards or away from the spacecraft.

In this interferogram, the peak ground motion is almost 50cm of motion towards the satellite.

"It's like a contour map but it's showing to the south-east of Christchurch that the ground motion is towards Alos. That's uplift," explained Dr John Elliott from the Centre for the Observation and Modelling of Earthquakes and Tectonics (Comet) at Oxford University, UK.

"And then right under Christchurch, we see subsidence. That's partly due to liquefaction but it's mainly due to the way the Earth deforms when you snap it like an elastic band."

Where the rainbow fringes become most tightly spaced is where the fault break came closest to the surface, although the data indicates the fault is unlikely to have broken right through to the surface.

Blind danger

Liquefaction is a phenomenon that afflicts loose sediments in an earthquake and is akin to a lateral landslide.

It is a major issue for Christchurch because the city is built on an alluvial plain, and this type of ground will amplify any shaking during a tremor.

BBC News reader Gillian Needham took this image of central Christchurch moments after the quake struck New Zealand's second city on 22 February
 
Scientists are using the Alos information to understand better the future seismic hazards in this part of New Zealand.

It has become obvious from recent events that Christchurch sits close to "blind" faulting - faulting that is at risk of rupture, but which betrays little evidence of its existence at the surface, meaning the potential danger it poses is not fully recognised.

"It means much more work needs to be done around Christchurch," said Dr Elliot.

"People knew they could get earthquakes further into the mountains [in the west of South Island]; that's how they've been built in some ways, through earthquakes and all the faulting.

"But to get an earthquake right under their city will have been a surprise to nearly every single person."

Liquid lurch

The interferogram is noticeably incomplete - there are several areas where the fringing is missing. There are a number of reasons for this.

To the east is ocean, and this technique does not work over water.

To the west, the issue is related to the satellite track and the fact that it views the Earth in strips. Hence, you get bands of data.

But the more interesting and more relevant omissions are in Christchurch itself.

Dr Elliot commented: "Here, the patches are the result of de-correlation between the acquisition images, where we just can't match them - they're too different.

"There are a few reasons for that. Usually it's the result of vegetation growth, but here it could be due to more extreme shaking or liquefaction."

Tuesday's quake was less energetic but more destructive

Researchers are investigating the relationship between September's Magnitude 7.1 quake and last month's 6.3 event.

The latter is very much considered to be an aftershock from the former, even though they were separated by six months.

The September quake occurred about 40km to the west, rupturing a similar length of fault. The most recent tremor ruptured about 15km of fault.

What scientists need to know now is the nature of any "seismic gap" between the two; that is, a segment of fault which was not broken in either tremor but which may have been loaded with additional strain because of both those events.

The Advanced Land Observing Satellite (Alos) was launched in 2006


Thanks to Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk for permission to run this article and images.