Camp Roberts - RELIEF: First Day Wrap-Up

On Wednesday, February 29, TIDES team and Camp Roberts participants held the first round of discussions on "Infrastructure as a System."  The original thinking behind this discussed was based as follows:  In the rush to provide basic infrastructure to populations who have been affected by disasters, solutions tend to focus on one type of intervention: shelter, water, sanitation, power, etc. In only rare circumstances are these infrastructural elements operating as an effective, integrated system. Articulated systems with coherent, strong feedback loops provide elegant solutions to otherwise complex problems. It is easy to see the benefits, for example, of a shelter system that is designed so that rainwater runoff from the roof pours into a water storage reservoir, which in turns flows through water purification for cooking, and where the excess cooking water is poured into a reservoir for a toilet. Generally, the technical approach to designing such systems is the easier part. The difficulty lies in the policies that encourage and reward an approach to problem solving based on addressing infrastructural elements as isolated problems, instead of addressing these elements as parts of a whole."

The discussion brought together participants from the US government - NDU, Naval Postgraduate School, Combatant Commands and FEMA, as well as a range of NGO and private sector representatvies such as Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, CrisisMappers, Synergy Strike Force, Geeks Without Borders and Burners Without Borders, among others. The participants agreed on the need to approach HA/DR infrastructure as a whole system, but the discussion turned to non-technical factors that often influence infrastructure deployments, such human interactions, interagency relationships, military-civil and military-NGO relations in the field and the sometimes hierarchical makeup of the HA/DR community in the affected area. The group discussed some of the ways that such impediments were overcome in recent disaster deployments and agreed to approach technical side of this debate on the following day.