Typhoon Yolanda and the FCO’s Rapid Deployment Teams

Two weeks ago, Mike Taylor led a Foreign Office Rapid Deployment Team (RDTs– we love our jargon!) from London to help locate British nationals affected by Typhoon Yolanda – or Haiyan –  in the Philippines.  Our RDTs are always on call to help deal with crises affecting British nationals around the world. 

There are four teams, based in London, the Americas, Asia Pacific and the Middle East and South Asia, ready to move on only a few hours notice. While the members of the RDT are all specially trained, they all volunteer for the team alongside their full time jobs: Mike is a team leader in the Foreign Office’s China Department. 

I’ve been a volunteer with the Rapid Deployment Team for a year, but had never been sent to assist with a crisis until I led a team from London to help locate British nationals affected by Typhoon Yolanda.

From the moment the scale of the damage became clear, the RDT members on call that week were placed on standby: on two hours notice to leave for the Philippines.

While the government geared up to be part of a huge relief effort, the Foreign Office was also trying to establish if British nationals had been caught up in the disaster and what kind of assistance they’d need.

Our call centre (empty banks of desks most of the time, but ready for action when crises strike) took details from concerned loved ones, on hotlines in London and Manila, while consular officers scoured social media for reports of missing Brits. The RDT’s job was to find them.

My team arrived in Manila on Tuesday 20 November, hot on the heels of our colleagues in the Asia Pacific RDT. Although I had never been deployed before, our training is realistic enough that I had an idea of what to expect as a team leader: confusing and contradictory information on the ground, having to balance competing priorities and endless logistical nightmares.

And there was an added security, health and welfare dimension: how could I minimise the risks to my team, while making sure we looked for British nationals in the most remote and hard hit locations?

The first Foreign Office RDT had done an amazing job of covering the majority of missing British people within Tacloban, at the centre of the disaster, and on the island of Cebu. They had been one of the first overseas consular teams into the area, before many of the bodies of the victims had been buried.

It’s reassuring that the Foreign Office offers welfare and counselling after difficult deployments and tries to prepare us with realistic training scenarios, though we’d all prefer not to have to see such upsetting things.

My team’s job was now to investigate cases further from the city: in Samar, Leyte and the westerly islands of Bohol and Western Visayas. Tragically, we arrived as the death of a British national was confirmed by the Philippine authorities.

Just getting into Samar and Leyte was a challenge. We were reliant on military flights into Tacloban: we flew in and out perched next to cargo and evacuees in British, US, Australian, Philippine and Swedish C130s, and on my first flight, a Marine Corps Osprey.  As what the military calls “Space A” passengers – i.e. you fly if space is available – deployments could be frustrating, with hours or in a couple of cases a day waiting for flights, but the military logisticians did their best to accommodate us.

Getting my team on flights became a major preoccupation, not to mention source of stress. If we couldn’t deploy, we couldn’t do our job.

We took calculated risks to move quickly to where we were needed. We knew there’d been some looting and had little knowledge of the state of the roads, and no immediate back up if anything went wrong.

Two of my team and their Embassy translator drove for a total of 12 hours to find two British nationals reported missing. Another team made a rough sea crossing on a local ferry. We did what we could to manage the risks and monitored the team’s movements from our base at the Embassy.

An officer from the RAF Regiment accompanied us on one visit, to liaise with the Philippine police and military and make a security assessment.

Besides managing the team’s activities, I also led a small team into Leyte and Samar, camping overnight next to AUSAID surgical tents in an inch of water at Tacloban’s airport. There was no food or fresh water, so we had to carry what we needed. For two days we drove up and down the wrecked coast of Leyte and southern Samar, visiting the addresses of those reported as missing by friends and loved ones back in the UK.

Our translator was a volunteer from the embassy: she had already deployed with the earlier RDT and, like all our local staff, did an incredible job tapping local people for information, from shop keepers to the chief of police. Back at camp, the rain and darkness confined us to our tents: I set out plastic plates, forks and cups on the floor for a meal of spam, bread and tinned fruit to keep our spirits up.

The best part of our job was finding people.

The Brits we found were usually surprised to see us at their door, in our high-vis jackets emblazoned with the Union Jack, often surrounded by curious locals who’d led us to their house. They told us about sheltering from flying glass in cupboards and losing friends and neighbours.

They struck me as a hardy bunch: a West Country man was repairing the damage to his roof when we arrived, a British flag at half mast in his garden.  Timber beams on his house had been split and metal bars buckled by the incredible wind. I was lucky to have experienced staff in my team, who could not only explain what consular assistance we could provide but also listen and offer emotional support.

In many cases we helped people to get a message back to loved ones back in the UK.

We wound down our work on the ground after two weeks. We were tired, but confident we’d done all we could. The two Rapid Deployment Teams had driven some 1,400 miles and found 24 British nationals reported as missing, as well as other foreign expats in need of assistance. We’d seen at first hand the terrible cost of Yolanda, but also the resilience of local people, Filipino and expatriate.

It was common to see inspiring messages painted on walls and signs: “Stay RELAXED. Tacloban will rise again!”

This will be my first and last deployment as part of a Rapid Deployment Team – at least for a while – as I’m soon to become the proud father of a baby girl.

What will I remember most about this week?

I’d be lying if I said that lack of sleep and stress won’t feature, or that the decisions I took were always the best ones. We all saw things that we found difficult. But for a week I felt part of a bigger international effort and will remember with gratitude the local people, aid workers, military personnel and other foreign embassy teams who helped us.

Most of all, I’ll remember being part of an amazing team, formed from people from all over the Foreign Office, working with equally dedicated staff in our embassy in Manila and in London, focused on a single purpose – to find and help British people. Once my wife lets me, I’ll definitely be back on that shift rota.