Senator Andrew Bartlett
Thursday, January 13, 2005
 
Rock of Aiders and where some of the $$$$ are going
Reports have come out about a tsunami fundraising concert to be held in Sydney on the 29th January. There's been understandable focus on the Labor member for Kingsford Smith, Peter Garrett, performing as part of a Midnight Oil reunion - something which would be great to see - but I'm even more interested in news that Nick Cave will be performing too. He'll be in town already performing as part of the "Came So Far for Beauty' Leonard Cohen Tribute". I haven’t seen any info on whether he’ll have any of the Bad Seeds playing with him at the Wave Aid concert (it would be very unlikely to have the full band on such short notice), or whether it will be just a solo gig at the piano, or some other variation, but either way it would be worth seeing. Plenty of other good bands are playing too.

In amongst all of the understandable focus on the amount of donations and the
ways to donate to help the Tsunami victims, it's important we also keep a focus on where the aid is actually going. I received an update from the Australian Red Cross today which some may also find of interest, so I'm posting some of it here.

To date, over $70 million has been raised by Australian Red Cross and the organisation has over 9,000 people working in the disaster area providing assistance throughout the region. Over 47 relief flights of emergency aid have been sent, and another 15 are scheduled in the next few days. Eight specialist Australian Red Cross aid workers have been deployed to the region and others are scheduled to go in the near future. As well, 14 emergency response units have been deployed into the region, specialising in water purification, health care, logistics and telecommunications.

Each of the water and sanitation response units have the capacity to treat up to 6,000 litres of water per day, and provide drinking water to 40,000 people, with a trucking and distribution capacity of 75,000 litres of water to three separate areas. The Red Cross basic health care response unit treats up to 30,000 people and comes complete with a 20 bed hospital unit providing immediate curative, as well as preventative and community health care. Follow this link for more specific details in each affected country.



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