-KATHMANDU
The Disaster Response Exercise and Exchange (DREE) that aims to strengthen coordination among multinational armies in the humanitarian assistance, rescue and assistance mobilization in the aftermath a major earthquake kicked off today.
The Nepal Pacific Resilience DREE is an annual civil-military disaster preparedness and response initiative between the Nepali Army and the US Army Pacific ( USARPAC). This year’s exercise will focus on exercise and evaluation of civil military coordination mechanism, a mass casually simulation, search and rescue exercise, camp coordination and Tribhuvan International Airport disaster response plan during a mega scale earthquake in Nepal, using a scenario developed by the National Society for Earthquake Technology, Nepal. The program has been jointly organized by Nepali Army & US Pacific (USARPAC) from 25-28 September 2018.
Representatives from military and disaster preparedness and response initiative of 14 countries including Nepal are taking part in the four-day event. Armies from Nepal, the USA, Sri-Lanka, Maldives, Bangladesh, Singapore, Canada, Philippines, Britain, Denmark, Belgium, Israel, India and China are attending it.
According to NA Disaster Management Directorate’s director Jeet Bahadur Gurung, earlier this type of exercise was held in 2011, 2013 and 2016 in Kathmandu. The mobilisation and coordination among multinational armies during the search, rescue and relief in the aftermath of ‘Gorkha’ quake that hit Nepal on April 25, 2015 was said to be highly effective.
Inaugurating the event, Chief of Army Staff, Purna Chandra Thapa, said mega scale natural disasters would not only affect socio-economic sector but also the human development. He was hopeful that such sort of exercise would prove a corner stone in the effective mobilization of available human resources and other sorts of resources to handle post-disaster situation.
Chargé d’ Affaires at the US Embassy, Michael C. Gonzales, who was also present on the occasion expressed his hope that experience sharing to take place during the exercise would contribute to conduct search, rescue and relief efforts after disasters on right time.
The NA stated that such sort of event will be conducted at the province level from the next time.
