Emergency Telecoms Provided for Indonesian Earthquake

Following the Indonesian earthquake at the weekend, the communications charity, Telecoms Sans Frontieres has sent a delegation to assist in providing emergency telecoms services to aid workers and displaced people who want to call worried relatives. Teams from TSF South East Asia, reinforced by TSF Europe, have been sent to the area most affected, Yogyakarta in the south of Java, arriving on Sunday. More than 200,000 people have been affected by the catastrophe and at least 5,100 have been killed according to initial estimates.

On site, TSF in collaboration with their partner OCHA ( the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs from the United Nations ) have set up 4 coordination centres : in the General Area of Yogyakarta, in Bantul at the resources centre for OSOCC ( centre for the United Nations coordination ), a liaison office in Klaten and a reception office at the airport in Yogyakarta.

In each of these centres, satellite links have been installed. Telephone equipment as well as Internet broadband access and fax lines are also available for use by the rescue workers in the area of the disaster.

Telecoms sans Frontieres is a humanitarian NGO specialising in emergency telecommunications. Thanks to a permanent monitoring centre, as soon as a catastrophe or conflict is announced, its teams can intervene anywhere in the world and in less than 48 hours. They install an operational telecommunications centre right at the heart of the event.

The idea for TSF was the result of a simple observation made after many years' experience with general humanitarian charities. During missions in ex-Yugoslavia, and in Kurdistan during the Gulf War, its founders realized that as well as medical or food aid, there was a real need for telecommunications.

These conflicts often led to massive displacements of populations, separated families, and no communications infrastructure was in place to help these people contact their relatives.

TSF offers victims of disasters or conflicts the possibility to break out of their isolation. After an earthquake when all the networks are destroyed, or in refugee camps which only have a very basic telecommunications infrastructure, the population is often totally cut off from the rest of the world. Being able to telephone is vital in these situations: to find dispersed family members, to contact relatives and thus maybe obtain immediate personalised help, or simply to say " I'm still alive ".

You can read more at their website: http://www.tsfi.org/"

Posted to the site on 2nd June 2006