by Clive Jewell
The appalling destruction and loss of life caused recently in the Caribbean, and particularly on the east coast of the United States and Canada by Hurricane Sandy, is a stark reminder of the awesome power of Mother Nature.
As I write this one week on, millions of households there are still without electricity, and many people now face the biggest challenge of their lives – having to quite literally rebuild them from nothing and with nothing.
In the aftermath of the hurricane, our colleagues in the British Consulate-General in New York City have been working closely with local authorities, doing all they can to assist any Britons who found themselves stuck in the city. For example, some people had to evacuate their hotels without being able to take their belongings, or were unable to return to their hotels at all, meaning they were not now in possession of their passports. Consular staff assisted these people by providing emergency travel documents.
In recent years and closer to home, staff from the British Consulates in both Lisbon and Portimão, along with the British Ambassador, were deployed to Madeira in February 2010 to assist our Honorary Consul in Funchal, Joy Menezes, in the immediate aftermath of the dreadful floods there, assisting British nationals caught up in that crisis, when, very sadly, more than 40 people lost their lives, including one British tourist.
During the evacuation of British nationals from Libya last year, consular staff from across Europe were called upon to support colleagues in that operation. Angie Morado, Vice Consul in Portimão, was one of those who travelled to Malta at very short notice to join the staff of the British High Commission in Valletta, and the resilience team of colleagues from other consulates and the Rapid Deployment Team from the Foreign Office in London.
Angie had two hours to hand her work over to a colleague, go home to pick up her “grab bag”, a pre-packed suitcase that can be “grabbed” pretty much on the run, wave goodbye to her family and pets, and head off to the airport. She returned eight days later having helped thousands of British nationals leave Libya and travel home safely via Malta.
Similarly, Pro Consul Ana Sofia Bono went to London to support colleagues in the crisis call centre who were taking thousands of telephone enquiries when multiple crises around the world were simultaneously active, and many staff had been deployed to provide assistance in the crisis locations.
These are challenges that consular staff know they will be expected to rise to when a crisis happens. It goes with the job; indeed, the desire to help people in times of extreme distress and crisis is the very reason most, I dare say all, consular officers do the job in the first place.
A crisis involving natural disaster almost always happens unexpectedly and so we have to be prepared and ready to respond. A crisis may present a challenge that has not been faced before. Who would have thought, for example, that a volcano in Iceland would quickly cause such extraordinary world-wide havoc? That was no local crisis. The majority of the Foreign Office’s global network went into some form of crisis response or another.
Similarly, the tsunami in Japan was the first crisis through natural disaster to threaten a major nuclear catastrophe.
Crisis preparedness and response is one of the key factors in ensuring that the Foreign Office continues to provide one of the most complete and advanced consular services in the world and, last month, the Foreign Secretary, William Hague, launched the new FCO Crisis Centre in London.
During early 2011, the Foreign Office experienced a series of international incidents that required a crisis response, including the earthquake in New Zealand, tsunami in Japan and the events of the Arab Spring.
Speaking at the launch, the Foreign Secretary said: “With this new Crisis Centre, for the first time we will be able to handle two large-scale events simultaneously; operating a centralised command structure, bringing different departments from across Government into a single place, with the right technology available, so that we can help those in trouble overseas.”
The launch of the Crisis Centre is another step in a cycle of continuous improvement in the way that we deliver our services to the British public.
With increasing numbers of British nationals living, working and travelling abroad, we need to ensure that we are innovative and make the most of emerging tools of communication, such as Twitter and Facebook, so that we can reach and help as many people as possible in a crisis.
In the last year alone, these new approaches and our new capacity has been tested no fewer than 13 times, including evacuating our diplomats and their families from Tehran, helping those involved in the sinking of the Costa Concordia and dealing with the coach crash in France earlier this year. They are proving to be flexible and resilient.
I hope that we can continue to improve the services and support that we provide, supporting the public when they need us and moving towards our objective of becoming the best diplomatic service in the world.”
British Embassies around the world each have a detailed Crisis Management Plan that must be continuously updated and tested, either in realistic table-top scenarios or semi-live exercises. Our “whole of mission” approach means that everyone working in the Embassy and the consulates has a part to play under the leadership of the Ambassador, especially if a crisis stretches over days or weeks.
You can find detailed information on what the FCO and Consular staff can do to help in a crisis, and what you can do yourself in preparation for such a situation, on our website www.fco.gov.uk or by simply typing FCO crisis overseas into your browser.
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British Consul to the Algarve Clive Jewell will be sharing with our readers interesting aspects of his job as well as important information for those living, working or holidaying in the region.
