Community Response

Actions of Community Response

During or immediately following a disaster, people need rescue and medical attention while locations need to be made safe, such as by shutting down gas and water supplies, keeping people away from unstable infrastructure or environmental features, and turning off machinery and vehicle ignitions. The quicker these actions happen, the fewer casualties and the less damage will result. Uninjured people in the disaster area are the closest to the scene, followed by locals outside the disaster area. Any waiting time for external help increases the disaster's costs in lives, injuries, and damage.

Medical aid is an example where waiting even minutes can kill. Heavy bleeding needs to be stemmed immediately, especially to avoid shock, which in severe cases can require advanced life support. For unconscious casualties, the immediate action of opening the airway can make the difference between a quick recovery and death in minutes. Having a population trained in first aid and willing to use those skills can also prevent casualties by obeying basic first aid rules such as securing an area before doing anything else, including casualty treatment.

Another example is searching for missing people under debris from collapsed infrastructure, buried by landslides or avalanches, or clinging to trees or trapped on small new islands in floodwaters. Local search and rescue is immediate, while bringing some knowledge of the identity of missing persons as well as familiarity with the surroundings, such as whether or not a building has a gas supply that needs to be secured, which mountain slopes might still be unstable, or which elders live alone and need support. Effective local search and rescue, however, requires pre-disaster training and preparation that must start long before a disaster.

Beyond immediate response, people in a disaster zone are those who must live with the experience and effects on their community for a long time afterward. If they stay, then they are the ones involved in rebuilding, hopefully incorporating disaster risk-reduction measures. By living in the community before the disaster and observing the disaster firsthand, they can advise on what worked and what failed; they know what they want for their community, and they can feel ownership in the rebuilding.

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