Updated Friday, April 25, 2008

Crisis protocol will speed disaster response

From wire and staff reports

OAK ISLAND - Southern Baptists took a major step toward responding more quickly to overseas disasters when their state disaster relief directors approved a new protocol for mobilizing "initial responders" to crisis situations overseas.

Gathering April 21-23 at Fort Caswell, for their annual "roundtable" meeting, disaster relief coordinators for three dozen Baptist state conventions approved a six-point recommendation from a subcommittee charged with hammering out the protocol in consultation with the North American Mission Board and Baptist Global Response, a new Southern Baptist international relief and development organization.

"This new agreement between the North American Mission Board and Baptist Global Response has pushed us way ahead," said Jim Didlake, disaster relief director for the Mississippi Baptist Convention, as he presented the proposal. "What we see here is something we have hoped for for a long time, and that is a real plan to respond to disasters overseas."

Southern Baptist response in times of crisis has been hampered by the difficulty of identifying team members with the appropriate skills and getting them quickly to the scene of the disaster, said Jim Brown, stateside director for Baptist Global Response. Under the new plan, Baptist state conventions will compile a roster of "initial responders" who will be given intensive training for crisis intervention. A major change in the new plan is that initial responders from two or three states will be on call for immediate response during designated months of the year.

"This approach gives us a lot of flexibility to meet the specific needs that arise when a crisis breaks, whether the need is to send in a team of four people or eight people or two teams of five people," Brown said. "States will be able to mobilize the initial responders very quickly. We will have two or three states on call at the same time, so the burden doesn't fall only on one state."

North Carolina has offered to be one of the states with a team on call, said Richard Brunson, the executive director of N.C. Baptist Men. The team will include members with a variety of skills who are able to leave quickly if a disaster strikes, he said.

"They will set things up for future teams," Brunson said.

State disaster relief directors plan to have initial responder teams online by June 1 to cover the remainder of 2008. Training for those teams will begin this summer and should be completed by Dec. 31, 2009.