Canada not ready to send response team to Asia crisis

OTTAWA (CP) - Although Canada's military keeps an emergency response team on standby to help in international disasters, it isn't "the right tool" to help victims of a devastating Asian earthquake and tsunami, federal officials said Tuesday.
"It seems the DART is not the right tool at this time," Col. Guy Laroche of the Department of National Defence told a Media briefing three days after the crisis hit. Officials were responding to criticisms that the Canadian Forces Disaster Assistance Response Team hasn't yet been sent to the region devastated by an earthquake that triggered massive tidal waves on Boxing Day.

Officials said they're not ruling out sending the DART team, which sets up a mobile field hospital, at some point.

But information is still coming in from the region and as yet, no government there has made a formal request to Ottawa for such help, officials said.

"We don't want to deploy something if it's not going to be useful," said Elissa Golberg with the Foreign Affairs department.

The DART team was last used five years ago to assist when a massive earthquake hit Turkey.

Its workings are complex, involving a kind of military field hospital that uses about 200 personnel including medics, engineers and security personnel.

Part of its expertise is in water purification, which is desperately needed in the stricken area that includes coastal areas from Sri Lanka to Thailand, India and parts of Indonesia.

But Laroche said that deploying the DART team isn't intended as a short-term response mechanism.

And it would take about 24 flights of a full Hercules aircraft to ferry the 200 DART personnel and all their equipment to the region, added Laroche, Coordinator for International Missions for DND.

Meanwhile, Canadian officials have been reviewing the DART program since fall - well before the current crisis - to find ways of making it more nimble, Golberg said.

"We've been evaluating this, even before the hurricane season in the Americas, to see how we might be able, for instance, to break it up into pieces so we can use it more frequently in the Canadian tool kit," she said.

"So these are things that have already been under active consideration by us."

© The Canadian Press, 2004