A group of specialist volunteers is ensuring that aid sent to Sri Lanka is redirected as fast as possible, reports Kathy Sheridan at Colombo airport.
In a hidden corner of Colombo's orderly airport lies Cargo Warehouse 2. This is transfer central for the thousands of tons of aid being flown into Sri Lanka night and day. It should be a nightmare of logistics. In the days immediately following the disaster, it was.
Scheduled as well as aid flights were sliding into a chaotic bottleneck, almost to a point of no return.
Enter the specialist volunteers from the Disaster Resource Network, an unlikely alliance of private air haulage giants DHL, TNT and the Emirates Group, based in Dubai. Set up after the last deadly earthquake, in Bam, Iran, exactly a year before the Christmas tsunami, shipping company DHL began sending plane loads of aid to the local airport in Bam. Consignments soon entered a log-jam.
So instead of sending the planes and adding to the chaos, the company put an expert team together to sort it. Now the Disaster Resource Network has found its feet, becoming known as an organisation that, in times of crisis, can provide logistics, transport and communications.
The key, says DHL's Chris Weeks, the operation's director, is to get in within three days, before operations can back up. "We got here in the nick of time. This keeps the airport open." They arrived on December 29th, and told the government of the problems that would develop.
"It took just six hours to persuade them to let us help. Compare that with Banda Aceh, where no team like this was allowed to run the airport. We're not military, not NGO, not government, not UN. We're seen as completely independent and professional airport-handling experts, purely volunteers here to do what they can to help."
Its effectiveness is manifest in the organisation of supplies in the massive 8,000 sq metre warehouse. Some 92 aid flights have deposited their cargo into DRN's care; that's about 5,000 tons of relief supplies. All has been dispatched but for 400 to 500 tonnes received in recent hours or things that are useless or in over-supply.
"We have so many blankets, which are not essential anymore anyway," sighs Weeks, a man with about 20 people plucking at his shirt and another two on the phone. "You don't need blankets in this country."
The problem is aircraft can't be turned back, so valuable manpower and time had to be spent unloading them. This conforms to none of Weeks' plans. "There's far too much bottled water. What are needed are pumps to pump the sea water out."
Larry Nolan, originally from Barrack Street, Carlow, is the night-time director of operations. It's a constant pattern of moving, organising, processing and sending the result with a team of 12, assisted by US marines and local workers. A former employee of DHL, Larry tried working in the Middle East but has been back in Belgium looking for a job again. He is glad to be using his skills again in a good cause, albeit on 12-hour shifts.
Meanwhile, the stack of aid in the warehouse is a virtual map of the world. In the first 10 days, the team shifted over 3,000 tons of aid from around 50 countries. Today there's a motley supply in store - B12 complex vitamins and medicines from Malaysia; cream crackers, rice noodles and toilet rolls from the United Arab Emirates; paracetamol and baby food from Malta; kitchen sets from Germany; flour from Oman, body bags (white PVC with zipper) from Morocco and Norway; shoes and clothes and what appears to be a microwave or two from Austria. The poorest of countries have helped - Kazakhstan and Romania among them.
The on-going government versus militant Tamil situation means there are certain sensitivities: anything remotely electronic or aviation-linked will not be finding its way north to Tamil territory.
Weeks, a plain-talking man from near Bath, in England, would like the Sri Lankan air force to do rather more in the line of flights. The Americans have been generous with their helicopters but their capacity is frustratingly limited, at only a couple of tons. Given a choice, he'd like a few AN8s, capable of holding six to eight tonnes each.
In the meantime, he has his compensations: only he is allowed take a motorbike on the runway-type link between warehouse and terminal. It makes him smirk like a child.