City urged to improve disaster management

The city needs to improve its disaster management due to its geographical position close to active rupture zones along the west coast of Sumatra, where the intensity of earthquakes are increasing.

"Coordination is a key word when dealing with crisis situations when disasters takes place, because both central and regional administrations have various disaster management institutions," Harvard University crisis management expert Arnold Howitt said in a press release issued by the Presidential aide in charge of social aid and disaster division and obtained by The Jakarta Post on Thursday.

Howitt added that effective coordination was not only a matter of ability to develop networks among institutions but more of design of the relationship and precise job descriptions of the institutions.

He said that once the institutional design was appropriate, the next move would be bureaucracy reform and capacity building of human resources.

Howitt and another expert from Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Anthony Saich, were invited by the government to share their experience in crisis management and handling of disasters in the US and China.

Howitt expressed concern that the Regional Agency for Disaster Management (BPBD) in some provinces was filled mainly by officials with no competency in disaster management.

"I even heard a friend joking that BPBD are mainly filled with religious scholars."

He suggested capacity building of people who dealt with disasters was something that could no longer be delayed, let alone wait until Jakarta was struck by another quake.

"Harvard is ready to train Indonesian officials working in disaster-management institutes," he said.

The head of the public protection division at the Jakarta Crisis Center, Sarpu, said plans to deal with earthquakes were included in Jakarta's disaster management following a 2008 gubernatorial decree on disaster management.

"We conducted an earthquake and tsunami simulation at the National Monument area a few years ago," he told the Post.