Category: Emergencies

With Hurricane Tomas bearing down on Haiti and expected to make landfall on Friday, Oxfam is worried about the ability of the humanitarian community to mount a third simultaneous emergency response in Haiti while still responding to January’s earthquake and the cholera outbreak earlier this month. Read more »

In late October 2010, Indonesia was struck by a trio of disasters. An earthquake and resulting tsunami in Sumatra killed at least 272 people and displaced more than 500. The eruption of Mt Merapi, one of the most active volcanos in the world, has displaced nearly 70,000 people in Java. Read more »

In central Haiti, the Artibonite province is awash in water. As we drive through the cholera-stricken region on Sunday, day three of our emergency cholera response, I see water everywhere – rice paddies, irrigation canals, small rivers, cesspools and puddles. Read more »

Still recovering from a devastating 7.0 earthquake in January, impoverished Haiti is now dealing with an outbreak of the deadly, water-borne disease cholera. The fast-moving bacterial disease has killed 208 people so far and infected another 2,649 – mostly in rural areas of the Artibonite region, north of Port-au-Prince. Read more »

The northern Philippines was battered by Typhoon Megi earlier this week, with 11 deaths and 16 injuries reported so far from the storm. Oxfam is on the ground assessing the emergency needs of those affected. Read more »

Today is International Day for Disaster Reduction (October 13), and while most people know we help communities deal with the aftermath of disasters (like the Pakistan floods), you might not know we also do a lot of work helping communities prepare for future disasters. We take you to Haiti to show you how. Read more »

Oxfam staff member Jane Beesley reports from the field about our hygeine kit program in Pakistan, and why one of the first things we distribute in an emergency is the simple, incredibly effective bar of soap. Read more »

It’s been more than two months since the onset of flooding in Pakistan, and the world is still only beginning to grasp the scale of this disaster. Numbers, maps, comparisons to the geographical area of various familiar places – all of these things have helped us to understand the enormity of the crisis. But sometimes the big picture isn’t enough. Sometimes, when the losses are so great and the need is so urgent, the most powerful picture is a very small one. Here are two. Read more »

Oxfam staff member Jane Beesley is currently traveling throughout Pakistan, surveying the extent of the flood’s damage and assessing the impact of Oxfam’s emergency response. In this blog post — the first of a series — Jane visits Shikarpur District in the southern Sindh Province. Read more »

SBS podcast with Oxfam representative in Pakistan, Rebecca Barber, who says many are now under threat from diseases including malaria, dengue fever and acute diarrhoea. She told James Nunez there has been a sharp drop in donations for the recovery effort, and that much more international aid is needed. Read more »