Seaborne responses to natural and manmade disasters have been quite common, but they've usually been improvised. Here's the case for planning this valuable component of relief and recovery.

In the spring of 1940, as the Germans swept across France, they trapped the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk, a port on the English Channel. With no room for further retreat, it appeared that the bulk of the British forces would be killed or captured.

Vice Adm. Sir Bertram Ramsey, the flag officer at Dover, arranged for destroyers and transport ships to cross the Channel in an effort to rescue some of the troops. He hoped that 30,000 troops might be safely evacuated.

Then, when it became clear that the only way to rescue some of the troops was to take them out through the shallow water along the beaches, Ramsey added to his rescue fleet motor boats, fishing smacks, trawlers, lifeboats, paddle steamers — anything that could float — and sent them, too, across the Channel. He also commandeered 15 passenger ferries from Dover and 20 more from Southampton. The smallest vessel to cross the Channel was reportedly an 18-foot open fishing boat.

The result was described by Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill as a miracle. Instead of 30,000, more than 300,000 troops escaped from France to fight another day. (One of them was my Uncle Jim. He survived Dunkirk and the North African and Italian campaigns and lived to the age of 92.)

A second Dunkirk, in New York

There was a similar miracle in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001. As a result of the destruction and chaos caused by the terrorist attacks, hundreds of thousands of people were stranded in Lower Manhattan.

Yet that day an estimated 500,000 were evacuated by water from Lower Manhattan, and it was all done without a plan and without a single accident of any kind. New York’s emergency managers, who were scrambling to find a new operations center (their EOC was in one of the buildings that collapsed, and there was no back-up), were completely unaware of what had happened.

In their study of what happened, Jim Kendra, Tricia Wachtendorf and Henry Quarantelli from the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware wrote: "At around 11 a.m. there began a massive evacuation by a large number of boats and vessels that had converged on the sea walls and a few docks in the area. The everyday ferries, tour and dinner boats, and private pleasure craft that normally carry passengers, were joined by far more numerous vessels such as tugs, outboard runabouts, pilot boats, and oil spill response vessels, a Coast Guard cutter and even a retired fire boat, that were never intended to carry passengers.”

A small civilian vessel crowded with men of the British Expeditionary Force returns to a British harbor from the beaches near Dunkirk, France, in late May or early June 1940.

The authors say part of the convergence resulted from a call from the Coast Guard, which announced that safety and accident rules and regulations need not be strictly followed. They say the scene was reminiscent of the evacuation of British and French troops from Dunkirk. One reason for the prompt and effective response was that Peter Johansen, director of marine operations for New York Waterway, a major ferry operator, recognized the problem and had 23 of the fleet's 24 operating ferries converge on Lower Manhattan.

By the way, since no one was counting, the estimate of how many were evacuated by water varies. One source says it was more than a million, which would be three times as many as were hauled out of Dunkirk.

Both Dunkirk and New York City on 9/11 illustrate just how effective water-based emergency response can be, but they also suggest that water-based response is ad hoc, rather than part of a pre-arranged plan.

Christmas disaster Down Under

I first became interested in water- or ocean-based response to emergencies when I went to the northern coast of Australia nearly 30 years ago and examined what happened when Cyclone Tracy struck Darwin on Christmas Eve, 1974, and, quite literally tore the city apart.

Not only was the city left without water and power, all the streets were blocked with debris and 97% of the homes were damaged or destroyed. It was difficult to impossible to move about; even walking was treacherous, because much of the debris was sharp-edged pieces of metal torn from corrugated roofs. That was especially serious in Darwin, because the climate there is subtropical and many residents wear sandals. The first problem was to clear the streets. It was three hours before the first ambulances could move about in the shattered city.

Inevitably there was a massive response to Darwin. A medical team flew in from Katherine, which is closer to Darwin than any other community, though the plane had to land avoiding debris on the runways without any assistance from the tower.

The head of the Natural Disasters Organization flew in within hours. Police from a number of states were recruited and sent to assist with relief. An enormous airlift using commercial aircraft was organized to evacuate about two-thirds of the population.

But there was also something else, something related to the fact that almost all of Australia's major cities are on its coastline.

One week after Christmas, even though most of its sailors had been on Christmas leave, a well-equipped, self-sufficient rescue team of the Royal Australian Navy arrived in Darwin on two warships, HMAS Melbourne and HMAS Brisbane. The two ships had sailed as soon as they could load supplies and had enough crew to get under way. Other crew was picked up en route.

In studying the response to Darwin, I was struck by the role of the Australian Navy and suggested it be incorporated into Australia’s emergency plans. At that time, however, I didn’t see it as something that might have potential elsewhere.

Seaborne relief at Halifax

However, when doing research on Canada's worst catastrophe, the Halifax explosion, I ran across the same sort of thing.

On Dec. 6, 1917, the S.S. Mont Blanc, a French ship carrying aviation gasoline and munitions, collided with a Norwegian ship, caught fire and soon exploded with one-seventh the power of the first atomic bomb.

Nearly 2,000 people were killed in the explosion or when they were trapped in their homes and died in the thousands of fires that started when wood stoves tipped over. Roughly 9,000 were injured.

At that time, Halifax had about 60,000 inhabitants, which means that one-fifth of the population was killed or injured within minutes. If the same impact had occurred in New York City, there would have been 3 million dead or injured. In Halifax, among the dead were the fire chief and all the senior fire officers. There were also thousands of homeless.

Within hours, two U.S. Navy ships, the Tacoma and Von Steuben, whose crews had seen and heard the blast while passing en route from France, sailed into the harbor and offered assistance. The Old Colony, another U.S. Navy ship, which had come into Halifax for repairs, was turned into a hospital ship. A U.S. Coast Guard vessel, the Morrill, also assisted.

All this help took place while the railway telegraph lines were still down, while the railway was being repaired, at a time when roads were just barely passable.

Further supplies also came by sea, especially from Boston, even though the weather was so bad one of those ships had to stop in Yarmouth for a night.

And like the Royal Australian Navy ships that went to the relief of Darwin, the Americans were self-sufficient. Their crews could go into the city to assist, then return to their ships to eat and drink and sleep and change clothing. They were not a strain on the already-beleaguered city.

A cure for convergence

HMAS Kanimbla: The Australian ship HMAS Kanimbla brought 780 tons of equipment and stores and several hundred personnel to th disaster area and as of early February was on station off Banda Aceh. (Commonwealth of Australia Dept. of Defence)

In the wake of massive destruction, roads and rail lines must be repaired, which can take days, weeks or months, but the sea repairs itself. Thus ocean-based disaster response can begin immediately. Admittedly, there may be some problems if a harbor is damaged, but that’s less of a concern than repairing what can easily be miles of roads and rail lines.

In Halifax, for example, there was a brief delay while naval authorities checked out the situation, but within 48 hours convoys were running smoothly. That was vital to the Allied war effort, because Halifax was then the most important port on this side of the North Atlantic.

But there are other advantages to ocean-based response.

One of the major problems in the wake of disaster is over-response. Those who study disasters called this “convergence,” a term conceived in 1957 by Charles Fritz and J. H. Mathewson in a paper for the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences.

What it means is that there are so many messages being passed around that radio and phone systems jam, that so many supplies are sent to the stricken area that handling them becomes a problem, and that so many people volunteer to assist that that, too, becomes an issue. After the attacks on New York City on Sept. 11, 2001, officials there were pleading with outsiders, such as firefighters, not to come. Over-response is a major problem in most disasters.

But when that response comes by sea, it's not nearly as difficult to handle. There were, for example, far too many ships in Alaskan harbors after the 1964 earthquake, but they were able to anchor and carry on, without becoming a strain on the affected ports. There may be costs involved if ships can’t be unloaded, but there’s no additional strain on the stricken community.

Norway's long coast and America's four coasts

In addition to assisting relief efforts on Sri Lanka, personnel from Royal Navy fleet auxiliary Diligence flew to the Maldives, where they helped repair generators and a desalination plant. Royal Navy personnel also helped clear rubble from the remains of a church that had been hit by the tsunami during a service, killing most of the congregation. (Royal Navy)

In the mid-90s, a senior officer in Canada’s Surgeon General’s department suggested I go to Norway to see what was being done there.

What I discovered was that the Norwegian government had figured out that the best possible response to Norwegian emergencies, since so many Norwegian cities are along the coast,would be by sea.Vessels could respond to an emergency in Oslo, Stavanger, Bergen, Trondheim or Narvik, or any of the other cities along the coast.

As part of this plan, coastal vessels were retrofitted so they could act as emergency responders. The major ferries, the ones that run between places like Larvik to Fredericshavn in Denmark, had equipment added so their car decks could be used as hospital wards.

(The biggest problem at that time was making plans to empty all the liquor before the ship was sent on an emergency response. Most of these ferries carry travellers who want to take advantage of lower prices in the European Union.)

The government decided that if these vessels were sent on an emergency, they would continue to be run by their normal crews. The ship's captain would remain as captain. The crews would continue to live in crew quarters. The medical teams and other responders would use the passenger cabins.

The only change would occur if the captain felt that his ferry was heading into danger. Then the Royal Norwegian Navy would take charge and the government of Norway would assume liability.

The plan has never been implemented, but it makes sense. It would also make sense along the East and West coasts of Canada and the United States and the Gulf Coast. Anyone looking at a map of Canada and the United States can see how many major communities are accessible by sea, especially if we also add North America’s “fourth coast,” the Great Lakes.

A trial run

In 1997, Canada's navy decided to see what a warship could do in the event of a coastal emergency. The town of Port Alberni, which is on a deep inlet off the west coast of Vancouver Island, had been hard hit by a tsunami from the 1964 Alaska earthquake.

So the Royal Canadian Navy agreed to detach one of its frigates, HMCS Calgary, from a major naval exercise, MARCOT '97, and send it to Port Alberni, where the local authorities were running their own exercise called Operation Jericho.

There were some problems.

• The Calgary gets part of its water supply by desalinating sea water. This proved awkward in Port Alberni, because the harbor water was at that time contaminated by effluent from a paper mill.
• The Calgary could have generated power for the community, but it would have had to carry equipment to allow its 440-volt power supply to be linked to the town’s power system.

But there were also some successes.

• The Calgary's communications systems allowed the ship to both replace local radio and provide contact between Port Alberni and agencies elsewhere, at a time when there were other problems with communications (real problems, not exercise "problems".
• The ship could provide a well-equipped, secure location for a local emergency operations center.
• The Calgary's medical supplies would have allowed the ship to serve as a back-up hospital. In fact, one of the major payoffs from the exercise was that the local physicians developed enormous respect for the crew who handle medical problems.
• Most important, the Calgary's crew members could assist on shore even with such activities as firefighting without causing a strain on local resources. (Because fire at sea represents such a terrible threat, those who serve on ships are well-trained firefighters.)

A century and more of disaster assistance

By then it was becoming clear that Darwin and Halifax weren’t isolated cases. In 1877, for example, the U.S. Coast Guard responded after a major fire largely destroyed Saint John, New Brunswick. The U.S. Revenue Cutter Gallatin made two trips from Boston with relief supplies.

In 1964, after the earthquake, rail problems in Alaska forced ships to break their way through to Anchorage, a port once considered icebound in winter.

In 1975, a private ferry operator handled the evacuation and return of residents to Port Alice on the west coast of Vancouver Island after a mudslide. The only road was out because a bridge had been washed away.

In 1978, equipment for restoring highways was brought in by ferries to Prince Rupert in far northern British Columbia, after flash floods washed out many highway bridges, as well as damaging the gas pipeline and destroying the rail lines.

The one type of waterborne response that often is planned is by fireboats. In 1989, after San Francisco's Loma Prieta earthquake, a serious fire in the Marina district was stopped only after the arrival of the fireboat Phoenix. Problems with water pressure and a building collapse on top of hoselines left the San Francisco Fire Department short of water.

At this time the flames were approximately 75 feet high and visible for several miles. The entire neighborhood was threatened with conflagration. The Phoenix then supplied an engine, two aerial ladder trucks and monitors on both sides of the burning building. With this ample water supply, the fire was brought under control.

The Navy dispatched three amphibious ships from San Diego to assist with recovery efforts. One of them, the helicopter carrier USS Peleliu, housed 300 displaced earthquake victims. Ferries proved crucial when the Bay Bridge went out.

In 1992, when Canada offered assistance to the United States after Hurricane Andrew (partly in return for the assistance at Halifax), the Royal Canadian Air Force determined what was to be done, but supplies and personnel that arrived on the Canadian Navy supply ship Protecteur helped rebuild two schools.

In 1995, even though much of the harbor in Kobe, Japan, was destroyed, some relief workers and supplies came in over the seven wharves that were still usable.

Improvisation in South Asia

Ocean-based response to disaster is, in short, common and competent, but it's rarely part of any plan.What happened in the wake of the South Asian tsunami illustrates that.

As of late January, under the name Operation Garron, the Royal Navy had sent frigate HMS Chatham to Batticaloa in Sri Lanka, where it had surveyed and marked a safe passage through the new sand bars so fishermen could start fishing again. The fleet auxiliary RFA Diligence had joined Chatham and provided technical support from its workshops and used its desalination equipment to produce fresh water.

Shore parties from the two ships provided shelter for those whose homes had been destroyed, cleaned out wells and made them safe to drink from again, and helped repair and refloat fishing boats left damaged and stranded on the shore.

In addition, the oceanographic survey ship HMS Scott had been assigned to begin an immediate survey of the seabed at the earthquake’s epicenter and gather data before sediment disguised the changes to the seabed's structure.

The Royal Australian Navy sent HMAS Kanimbla, an amphibious transport ship, which delivered a detachment of Australian Army engineers in mid-January and took up station as a floating support and logistics base for relief and reconstruction work in Banda Aceh.

Kanimbla is equipped with medical supplies and heavy equipment and can deliver those in outlying places both by helicopter and its two LCM-8 landing barges, which can bring in supplies to shore even where the harbor facilities are destroyed.

Two frigates and a helicopter carrier were among the ships the French navy sent as part of its humanitarian relief effort in the Maldives, Thailand and Indonesia.

Leaving the largest for last, under Operation Unified Assistance, the United States according to the latest count had sent more than 20 ships into the region, including 12 from the U.S. Navy, 10 from the Military Sealift Command and at least one Coast Guard vessel.

There has been an enormous response by air as well, of course, and there have been attempts to respond by land. But, after a while, it became increasingly evident that a response by sea made a great deal of sense and that since the devastation came from the sea, relief could reach those in need by the same route.

Planning for next time

As we saw in Asia, harbors and sea fronts can be dangerous places. They're exposed to tsunamis and storm surges and are the first point of impact for hurricanes. Through them move all sorts of dangerous cargos, as we saw in Halifax in 1917 and was also true at Bombay in 1942 and Texas City, Texas, in 1947.

And as we've seen since the Torrey Canyon (English Channel, 1967), Arrow (off Nova Scotia, 1970), Amoco Cadiz (off France, 1978) and Exxon Valdez (Alaska, 1989), tanker accidents can cause terrible spills.

But the potential of ocean-based response is also enormous. Yet time after time, the response is ad hoc. No one anticipates the value of the sea as a route for response.

Local people are best equipped to make effective disaster plans, because they know their own area and their own resources and personnel.

To begin planning for seaborne disaster response, local authorities need to identify the available resources, and to include the potential of occasional traffic, such as cruise ships.

Those places that can be reached by sea or from ports should be identified. (If a road is cut, resources can move quickly from one port to another and access communities on both sides of such a break.)

It should be determined what supplies might be needed and where they might be located.

It should also be determined whether the available vessels are capable of responding as they are, or if they need some retrofitting to make their potential much greater, as has been done in Norway.

And the idea of ocean response needs to be sold to those who are likely to be responsible when disaster strikes. The examples given here, especially those from the recent tsunami, suggest that this idea might be very well received.

The Norwegian solution: From ferry to hospital ship By Surgeon Capt. Jan Sommerfelt-Pettersen Royal Norwegian Navy   All manmade and natural catastrophes will result in mass casualties, so how should we prepare for such events? Although the Royal Norwegian Navy received its first hospital ship in 1700, we currently do not have any hospital ships in service in peacetime. Our concept for creating this capability is based on requisitioning civilian ships. In 1952 the Norwegian parliament passed a law making it possible to requisition ships for wartime purposes. Since the 1980s the Royal Norwegian Navy has cooperated with shipping companies during the building phase to prepare coastal steamers and North Sea passenger ferries for possible wartime use. And under a law passed in 2000 that governs medical emergencies, ships can be requisitioned whether Norway is at war or not. One of the new coastal ferries that can be quickly converted into a hospital ship. The helipad is visible high on the stern, and the car deck, where the main hospital areas would be, is at quay level. (Magne Ahjern, Royal Norwegian Navy) Among the ships currently ready for requisitioning are a coastal steamer prepared as a transport ship for casualties and four smaller catamarans prepared as ambulance vessels. The newest such vessels are two coastal passenger/vehicle ferries, Midnatsol (pictured) and Finnmarken, which have been prepared for potential service as hospital ships. Delivered in 2003, each ship is about 440 feet long, displaces about 15,000 metric tons and can take 1,000 passengers. Speed is 18 knots. During the ships’ design and construction, the navy cooperated with the yards and the shipowners on the necessary modifications. The main ones are: electrical and water supply for the hospital, installation of piping for medical gases, a helicopter platform to receive patients by air, and modification of the elevators to take patients from the helicopter deck down to the hospital area. All these modifications are permanent, except for the helicopter platform onboard one of the ships, though the platform can be installed on this ship in a short time. The modifications for the ferry with an integrated helicopter platform cost the navy approximately $1.3 million. In case of war or disaster, a hospital can be established on the ship’s car deck, where tarpaulins will be used to separate the various rooms. There will be four operating rooms and one intensive-care unit with 10 beds.We will have a separate room for X-rays, as well as sterilization and laboratory units. Heat fans are installed to warm up the area. The ships can receive patients by air, by sea and from shore. Patients who don’t need intensive care will be taken to passenger cabins, so each ship can accommodate up to 200 patients. Some of the civilian officers and crew will continue to serve onboard in case of war or disaster, and military and healthcare personnel (from the navy, Defence Medical Services or civilian hospitals) will also board the vessel. In case of war or disaster, the ships will go to Haakonsvern Naval Base, outside Bergen, where their medical equipment and supplies are stored. Converting a ferry into a hospital ship will take only one or two days. The Royal Norwegian Navy's medical service is now preparing these ships for international use. When the negotiations are finished, the ships will be available for international military missions (through NATO) and civilian humanitarian missions (through the United Nations and other organizations). We expect the contract to be signed this year. Based on the 1952 law, the modifications to the ships and cooperation with the ships’ owners, the Royal Norwegian Navy will be able to offer these two 200-bed hospital ships on a couple of days’ notice. The operating costs are not yet known, but will be based on commercial contracts. In any case, the Norwegian system of civilian-military partnership will provide this capability quickly for a fraction of the cost of keeping dedicated hospital ships afloat.

This article was adapted from a speech given to the Transportation Research Board, a division of the National Research Council, in Washington, D.C., in January 2005.

Also read Joseph Scanlon's The importance of ocean-based response to disasters