Disaster aid: This is the machinery to activate urgent survival kits

Blankets, diapers, soap: the logistical machinery to activate survival kits after a fire, earthquake or another catastrophe requires a lot of organization and agility to reach the victims in time and save lives; for it amazon has just inaugurated its first Natural Disaster Relief Center in Europe.

The enormous racks of the center, located in the German town of Rheinberg, in the Düsseldorf region, near the bank of the Rhine, are prepared to house 1,000 pallets ready for urgent deployment in the event of a disaster and with the possibility of expanding in case of need.

The products are selected, prepared, packaged and stored waiting to receive the request from the organizations on the ground for urgent shipment to the destination of the disaster.

The lots are varied: from shelter items such as tents, blankets, bunk beds, mats, sleeping bags, to brushes and toothpaste for personal hygiene, or for cleaning, for example gloves.

“We are available to organizations that ask us for items to help in devastated areas and send them in a matter of hours,” Bettina Stix, global head of Amazon’s Natural Disaster Relief team, has assured EFE.

Stix made these statements during a visit with international media to the recently inaugurated center in Germany, after a tour during the middle of the workers’ work day while the forklift drivers drove their emblematic “Bulls” through the corridors of the facility moving pallets full of merchandise.

Amazon has Natural Disaster Relief Centers in the United States, Asia and Australia. The company has used its inventory, logistics infrastructure and technology to respond to more than 145 natural disasters and humanitarian crises since 2017, donating more than 24 million relief items worldwide.

According to Amazon’s directive, Europe, like the rest of the world, is under the threat of floods and forest fires due to climate change but also of earthquakes, even volcano eruptions.

Help without hindering rescue efforts

“We do not send anything until the organizations expressly ask us to; “The idea is not to collapse the disaster site with oversaturation of merchandise or hinder rescue work,” Stix explained.

Amazon works year-round with emergency relief organizations; for example, the Red Cross, Save the Children and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the United Nations’ main intergovernmental body on migration.

Red Cross spokesperson in Austria Gerald Czech has urged collaboration between national and international partners to quickly coordinate humanitarian aid donations and save lives. It is essential that “food, water, shelter items” arrive on time, he added.

According to Amazon’s directive, the 80% of basic necessities requested in cases of emergencies is repeated in each disaster, but the rest is unpredictable.

He cited a recent devastating mega wildfire in which “They asked us for punts and we didn’t have them planned; we finally managed to send them to them”; The victims were removing the rubble in search of remains of jewelry, gold items, and heavily loaded goods. “emotional” but they had no devices to filter valuable articles from the ashes.

Regain dignity with precious possessions

After meeting their basic survival needs, disaster victims long to recover part of their “dignity” with access to your physical memories, which are very important on an emotional level, the Amazon directive added.

Each disaster has its peculiarities; A very relevant utensil, although not always in everyone’s mind to provide as help, is “the can opener”; There is no point in sending help if the victims cannot open the containers, he warned.

Amazon also provides urgent disaster survival kits, technology and innovation to facilitate communications with emergency digital networks; for example, vehicles enabled for this and “cloud” computing to operate in adverse environments.

In natural disaster environments “We will increasingly see the presence of artificial intelligence for predictions, to analyze and understand what is really happening in devastated areas.”

This is what Mo Ramsey, senior manager of the Amazon Web Services Disaster Response team, explained to EFE, after remembering that technology is capable of identifying very valuable patterns for disaster relief, invisible, however, to the human eye.

In the tragic earthquake in Türkiye last year, he noted, “we saw with drone images, in an area where no one was looking, that something was moving”; It was proven to be a person’s finger, it was “incredible.”

With the use of sensors and drones the images are much more detailed than with satellites; Comparing them before and after a disaster has the advantage of speeding up the identification of the most devastated areas that need urgent help.

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