Typhoon Haiyan was a natural disaster on a catastrophic scale. How did ASEAN react to this, and how good were its humanitarian assistance and disaster relief efforts?
At the end of October 2013, the Vietnamese government, together with the ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance on disaster management (AHA Centre), successfully organised the ASEAN Disaster Emergency Response Simulation Exercise (ARDEX-13) in Hanoi’s Bavi district. The four-day civilian-military exercise, the largest in Asean, was last held in 2008 in Rayong, Thailand. Joined by all Asean member states, UN agencies and international observers, ARDEX- 13’s objective was to practice, assess and review the existing Standard Operating Procedure for Regional Standby Agreements and Coordination of Joint Disaster Relief and Emergency Response Operations (Sasop) under the ASEAN Agreement on Disaster Management and Emergency Response (AADMER) framework. During the simulation exercise, both strategic and tactical components in emergency response were tested, such as requesting and receiving humanitarian assistance, joint emergency rapid assessment, the mechanism to receive response entities, and rescue and relief operations.
Only 15 days after ARDEX-13, Typhoon Haiyan, known as Typhoon Yolanda in the Philippines where it made landfall, struck its central provinces on the morning of November 8, 2013. Winds of up to 315km/h tore through coastal cities, causing widespread devastation. As many as 5,982 lives were lost, with 27,022 injured, four million displaced, 12 million affected and more than a million houses damaged. President Benigno Aquino III of the Philippines declared a state of national calamity and international support began to trickle in.
