An Integral Disaster Response was launched on 12 December 2014 for Typhoon Hagupit in The Philippines, known locally as “Ruby”. Although the impact was much less than the previous devastating Typhoon Haiyan, the storm caused significant damage: a total of 18 deaths were reported and 39,384 houses totally destroyed …
Jan Eyre, Integral’s Disaster Management and Programme Coordinator says, “Not all of our Haiyan involved Members are responding to Hagupit as there are pockets of areas affected rather than the wide-scale devastation we saw in November 2013. However, there are still significant needs within these areas which through continuing to combine our resources, as we did with Haiyan, we can more quickly assist greater numbers of affected people.”
Integral has facilitated two conference call to date and are actively sharing information, funding needs, photos and stories on their dedicated DR website. Currently nine Integral Members have opted into the response: Cedar Fund, Food for the Hungry, MAP International, Medical Teams International, World Renew, World Relief US, Tearfund UK and Tear Netherlands, and seven are undecided. The main needs have been identified in the areas of Shelter, Agriculture and WASH.
Current activities of Integral Members include:
- Food for the Hungry, who were already working in the badly affected area of Western Samar, is planning a shelter response in addition to the work that they have been doing with evacuated communities.
- Tearfund UK are supporting Tear Netherlands, whose partner PCMN is currently engaged in relief distributions in Northern Samar.
- World Renew are responding in Eastern Samar targeting 1622 households in previously Haiyan affected areas of Guiuan and Tacloban. They are providing shelter kits in addition to some emergency food aid and NFIs.
- MAP International has shipped considerable medical supplies to keep essential health services going.
- Medical Teams have sent an assessment/ response team to Tacloban.
A decision was made on the last teleconference for the Integral Hub Office in The Philippines to hold in country coordination calls for all its responding Members. This approach will be reviewed in mid-January to see if any further facilitation is needed.
