New centre to coordinate response to natural disasters

SINGAPORE — In an effort to coordinate responses to natural disasters between South-east Asian nations, the set-up of the Changi Regional Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief Coordination Centre (RHCC) was announced today (Sept 12).

Hosted in the Changi Command and Control Centre, the RHCC aims to leverage on the ready facilities for large-scale multinational operations and exercises. It will focus on supporting a disaster affected state’s military by coordinating assistance provided by foreign ministries.

On top of that, it will support and complement other existing mechanisms such as the United Nation (UN) Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), in assisting the affected state’s national disaster management authorities to coordinate overall relief effort.

It hopes to do so by fusing information from regional disaster and early warning centres prior to predictable events such as a typhoon and distributing situation picture to the partner militaries through its OPERA Command and Control Information System (CCIS) web-portal.

RHCC will also conduct initial planning and scale up for a possible multinational military humanitarian relief operation if the affected state agrees, and continue to broadcast the updated situations to partner militaries, so as to facilitate decision-making and reduce duplications and gaps in the assistance provided.

The centre, helmed by possibly nine to 50 Singapore Armed Forces personnel depending on the situation at hand, will be able to monitor an area with a radius of 3,000km and is looking into engaging partner militaries.

Speaking at the “Building Civil-Military Capacity for Disaster Relief Operations” regional conference, Second Minister for Defence Chan Chun Sing stressed the importance of delivering more effective disaster responses due to the region being disaster-prone.

“Recent experiences in the disasters of our region have shown that civil to military as well as military to military coordination can be enhanced. Dialogue between civil to military actors must continue, and is one way to build a more collaborative culture between all disaster response stakeholders.” said Mr Chan, who is also the Minister for Social and Family Development.