South Asia Seismic Response Opening Remarks by U. S. Ambassador to Nepal James F. Moriarty

South Asia Seismic Response Preparedness Conference
Honolulu HI
Tuesday, February 22, 2005

  
Excellencies, Mr. Secretaries, Generals, Ladies and Gentlemen:  Aloha !  

It is a great pleasure to join you here in beautiful Honolulu this morning for this important and timely conference on ways that countries of South Asia and the Pacific can coordinate civil and military responses to seismic events across your threatened regions.  

I want to thank the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Installations and Environment, the United States Pacific Command, the Central Command, the Center of Excellence in Disaster Management & Humanitarian Assistance and the U.S. Army War College’s Center for Strategic Leadership for their leadership and hard work in organizing this event.  I believe that our work here these few days will result in a greater understanding of the issues related to seismic response preparedness, how they can be addressed and how we can work together to best do so.  

All of us live in countries that face major seismic threats.  Many of us have personal knowledge of the effects of earthquakes in our own countries in recent years.  A number of us come from areas that have just suffered horrific loss and hardship from the tsunami of last December 26.   Besides the human heartbreak and economic hardships they bring, the ecological impact of such events is often permanent, so we must maximize our readiness to minimize the effects of the next major seismic incident. 

This conference offers us an opportunity to share and learn from each other so that the countries we represent are better prepared to respond at home and to coordinate our response efforts across national boundaries, if needed.   Like other natural phenomena, earthquakes do not respect national boundaries.  The reach of the tsunami was greater than 5,000 miles.  The more your governments, armed and civilian defense forces stand ready to respond to a future seismic incident -- be it on land or from the seabed -- the less will be the loss of life and property.  How the services of your nations – civilian and military – can better coordinate their response systems is what we are here to discuss this week.      

The United States Government has played a large role in earthquake relief whenever it could be of help – in Latin America, the Caribbean, the Caucasus, South Asia and the Pacific.  The mountainous swath across the Hindu-Kush-Himalaya is liable to be the next area of a catastrophic seismic event.  It could affect many of you and your citizens.

Embassy Kathmandu is following this issue very closely.  As the United States Ambassador to Nepal, I am personally very seized of it.  There are two principal reasons:

First, the Kathmandu Valley has a history of a major earthquake every 70 years.  The last one, in January 1934, measured 8.4 on the Richter scale.  Even though its epicenter was 150 miles to the east, more than half of the 8,500 persons who died lived in Kathmandu; 70 percent of the city’s buildings were damaged.  A former lakebed, Kathmandu Valley is likely to become a swirling vortex of wet sand after the next big earthquake, which -- according to all calculations -- is already overdue.  The tectonic plate of the subcontinent pushes north at a rate of three centimeters a year, increasing concern about an imminent “earthquake bomb” across central Nepal with each tremor. 

With its burgeoning population of over one-and-a-half million and a growth rate of 6.5 percent, the Kathmandu Valley has one of the highest urban densities in the world.  It is estimated that another quake at the strength of the 1934 incident would leave 45,000 dead, 90,000 injured and 600,000 homeless.  Once another major earthquake occurs, Kathmandu will suffer immense loss of life and property.  Communications between the capital and the rest of Nepal will certainly be severely impaired if not destroyed, thus affecting 25 million people.  

Similar realities apply throughout South Asia, as many of you already know and will hear more about from the experts today and tomorrow.  Their presentations will offer excellent opportunities to examine the issues surrounding a major seismic event and how they can be addressed.  At the U.S. Embassy in Kathmandu, we are preparing an emergency response plan that draws on expertise at post.  

Embassy Kathmandu houses the two U.S. Government offices devoted to disaster response and environmental issues in South Asia.  One is USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance -- OFDA -- which you may know from its superb record of on-the-ground responses to all types of natural disasters.  The other is the U.S. Department of State’s Regional Environment Office for South Asia.  It promotes regional policy approaches to environmental, science and health issues common to countries across South Asia.  Its disaster-prevention projects include the establishment of a regional real-time flood-forecasting system, involving six of the countries represented here. 

The presence of both civilian and military authorities among you echoes our experience in the United States:  that military support is critical to civilian authority in effective disaster management.  As organized, trained services, the military can mobilize quickly to provide food, medicine and other supplies and carry out search-and-rescue missions.  This special capacity was recognized early on.  After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the head of the American Red Cross relinquished responsibility for dealing with the aftermath, saying: “The Army has the organization, the equipment, the trained officers and men for dealing with the situation; no one else has it or could create it except at enormous expense and with inevitable waste.” 

Disaster management by the military has brought other dividends.  One is the advancement of science.  For example, U.S. Army doctors developed an antidote to stem the threat of epidemic after a volcanic eruption in the Philippines in 1911.  Another is military readiness itself.  Civilian emergencies provide more realistic experience in caring for mass casualties than most training exercises and often present conditions more similar to combat.  Successful disaster relief missions can improve both technical skills and a soldier’s morale from a job well done helping others.  

Over the years, military involvement in disaster response helped spawn the spirit of general disaster response practice today.  It is known as “scientific philanthropy”, which is defined as “efficient, ordered and carefully controlled assistance by specially trained professionals.”  Practitioners of “scientific philanthropy” have come to include not only the Armed Forces but also sister civilian entities such as our Federal Emergency Management Agency – FEMA, OFDA, other bilateral development agencies, the International Committees of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, WorldVision and other similar organizations. 

Coordination among uniformed and non-uniformed “scientific philanthropists” within one nation or among neighboring states has provided the best networks for disaster response.  We all saw how numerous civilian and military organizations worked together in response to the devastation of the tsunami in countries across the Pacific and South Asia.  OFDA and the U.S. Pacific Command were proud to contribute to the relief efforts in Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka and the Maldives.  The U.S. Government also mobilized assistance for the victims of the earthquakes in Turkey in 1999; Gujurat in 2001; and, Bam, Iran, in December 2003.  It is our belief that humanitarian needs override political differences.   Among direct neighbors, that should be even more the case – as Pakistan and India showed so admirably in Gujurat in 2001. 
 
This conference is topical as well as timely.  Those of you who have immediate memories of the tsunami devastation have much to contribute as you share the experience of your country’s technical, operational and policy readiness to respond to a major seismic event.   A key to that is civil-military preparedness. 

We have a chance in these next few days to explore new habits of cooperation among the governments and military of the region that can contribute to the more stable South Asia that we all know we need and want.  I hope we will use this conference as a forum of exchange that will lead our nations not just toward greater seismic response preparedness but also to a broader spectrum of regional and international collaboration. 

I wish you very fruitful discussions.  Thank you.