CHAPTER 2 Essential 5: Protect Vital Facilities: Education and Health
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Essential 5: Protect Vital Facilities: Education and Health “Assess the safety of all schools and health facilities and upgrade these as necessary.”
While it is true that the collapse of a school or hospital generates severe problems for a disaster-affected city, it is more common to see the “functional” collapse of these facilities, where structures may remain standing but cannot be used for a variety of preventable reasons. To avoid this, hospitals and schools must be constructed to high standards of resilience, access routes must remain open and the water supply, electric power and telecommunications must continue providing services to the facilities to guarantee continuity of operations.
Why? Schools and health facilities provide essential social services. As such, special attention must be paid to their safety and risk reduction efforts must focus on ensuring they can continue providing services when most needed. Not only do they house among the most vulnerable groups in society, schools and hospitals are also places of care, development and well-being. They carry out essential functions during and after a disaster, where they are likely to accommodate and treat survivors. The normal educational routines of children must be restored as soon as possible to avoid social and psychological repercussions.
What? Keep schools and health facilities operating and functional • Establish and implement action plans and programmes, maintain the structural and physical resilience and robustness of these facilities. • Examine the geographical location and investigate capacity requirements in emergency and recovery situations. • Assess disaster risk in schools and hospitals and strengthen/retrofit the most vulnerable • Introduce data on the vulnerability of schools and health facilities into risk assessments and ensure compliance with safety standards when deciding on the location, design and construction of all new infrastructure. • Create an action plan to assess and reduce vulnerability and risk in existing schools and health facilities by selecting and retrofitting the most critical (and vulnerable) facilities and incorporating stringent maintenance and repair programmes.