Earthquake in Turkey

CENTAUR’s practical application
supports Turkish relief response in crisis
By Mark Prutsalis

The Center’s Combined Event Notification Technology and Unified Reporting (CENTAUR) system faced its first real challenge in response to the August earthquake in Turkey. Within a week of the disaster, we were requested by the IBM Crisis Response Team in California to assist their office in Turkey in support of the Turkish Ministry of Health. Jim Rogers, the Center's Director of Program Operations, and I arrived in Turkey a few days after the call on August 30.

We found that the Turkish government desperately needed technical advice and an automated commodity-tracking system to help them manage the astounding amount of relief items arriving at several ports of entry in the country. At the Ministry of Health’s main warehouse in Istanbul, their three warehouse buildings were quickly overwhelmed-each stacked floor to ceiling with medical goods from all over the world. In Adapazari, we found boxes of goods piled haphazardly throughout the hospital buildings-filling every room, corridor and stairwell. The hospital itself had moved to tents outside as the roof had collapsed during the earthquake and the building was no longer structurally sound.

Based upon a two-day rapid needs-assessment of the earthquake damage and the government's response to the crisis, we were able to set the design specifications for a new commodity-tracking module for CENTAUR. This module would be able to track the receipt, storage and shipment of medical goods between eight warehouse locations in Turkey and hundreds of distribution points.

Within one week, our CENTAUR developers at Binary Tree in New York had completed the work on the system and we were able to deploy equipment and the software at the Ministry’s main Istanbul warehouse. This must have set some sort of record for software development, and highlights the benefits of CENTAUR technology’s flexibility for rapid modification according to mission requirements. We were also able to translate the entry screens into Turkish to facilitate the system's use by local staff.

The system has now been in use by Turkey in Istanbul, Izmir and other locations since early September. It allows them to record important information concerning dosage forms and types, quantities of availability, generic names, expiration dates, donors, and manufacturers and allows them to categorize the items by standard medical groupings. All data is replicated between all warehouse locations such that a warehouse in the earthquake zone can view the commodities available in the Istanbul or other warehouses to determine if items they require are available somewhere within the system.

The commodity-tracking system also generates shipping manifests to track all consignments sent from each warehouse, creating an electronic record of all commodity movements. Reports can be generated by the system to allow the inventory of one or more warehouses to be printed, or a record of all shipments can be generated.

Having a tool to organize their response to the August earthquake, we understand that the Turkish Ministry of Health was in a much better position to respond to the second major earthquake that struck in November. Based upon the success of this mission, the Turkish government is now considering adopting CENTAUR as a crisis management tool throughout the country, to better enable them to respond when natural disasters inevitably strike.