Rotarian and Kiama Downs resident Ian Johnston recently returned from a trip to Vanuatu, where he visited the island nation with a team of NSW emergency services professionals to facilitate the training of local emergency service teams.
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The team wanted to help a close neighbour in the Pacific region, and after reading about Vanuatu’s history of natural disasters, it was decided that was the place to take their expertise.
“The UN rates Vanuatu as the most disaster prone country in the world, by a long way,” Mr Johnston said.
“They have the full set, if you like, of natural disasters, they’re on the Ring of Fire, so there’s active volcanoes, earthquakes, and regular cyclones each season, all of those can cause Tsunamis.”
“When we started reading the statistics, just after Cyclone Pam in 2015, we had all the outcomes from that and the Vanuatu government had restructured the government as a result of that to better address the disaster response.”
Ian and a fellow team member visited Vanuatu in July 2016 to perform a scoping study to identify the country’s needs, before heading over as a group in August of this year.
“It was important that we addressed what they felt they needed and we didn’t just go in and tell them what they needed,” he said.
“When we arrived, the first week was preparation followed by two weeks of intensive training and a week of follow-up, once we got into the training I was asked on the third day how I thought it was going, my answer at the time was that we had already exceeded our expectations.
“The local people were like sponges, we had a team of five senior emergency services all with expertise in different areas and so we were able to cover all aspects of emergency services. Originally we thought we would get 20 or 25 people in the training course, as it turned out we had more than 60 people attend the training.”
Mr Johnston said it was the first time all the agencies had taken part in joint training.
“We’ve created a huge legacy there, they know each other on a first name basis and co-operate together,” he said.
There was also a welcome outcome, the team did not expect.
“With the fire brigade in particular, there was six recruits who were doing some volunteer work, hoping to get into the service and the training was such that they put them straight in as full-time fire fighting officers.”
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