7th Fleet Focus: Natural Disaster... Again, and Again...

Keep an eye on this. 7th Fleet has its hands full with natural disasters this week. Not only have we seen 2 tsunamis, one in American Samoa no less (which should be the top priority), but we have already seen one Typhoon hit the Philippines this week... and now a Super-Typhoon is inbound.

The Philippines declared a national “state of calamity” as Typhoon Parma headed for Luzon, where recovery efforts continue six days after Tropical Storm Ketsana devastated Manila and its surroundings, leaving 293 people dead.

Authorities began moving people from provinces north and southeast of Manila into shelters, Philippine Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro said in an interview on ABS-CBN television. The nationwide state of calamity gives the government the power to peg the price of basic goods.

Parma’s eye was 254 kilometers (158 miles) northeast of the city of Daet on Luzon at 2 p.m. Manila time today, the U.S. Navy Joint Typhoon Warning Center said. The typhoon is forecast to make landfall after 8 a.m. tomorrow.

I expect we will see the Reagan CSG pop up right after the Super-Typhoon passes as "Johnny on the spot" ready to help. The Navy blogosphere is trying to nail down some blogger roundtables with folks in the Pacific dealing with the natural disaster situations in the Pacific, hopefully something comes of it.

Expect a lot of discussion on this topic over the next week. We have elevated HA/DR as a core emphasis of strategy, and the anniversary of CS-21 is almost here - a perfect opportunity to evaluate HA/DR's new emphasis. We see natural disasters in places like the far southeast of 7th Fleets AOR and the far southwest of 7th Fleets AOR, and 2 major typhoons in a row now hitting the Philippines, right in the middle of 7th Fleets AOR.

The Pacific is gigantic, that is a lot of range to cover and it is very hard for ships to do it quickly. This is the real life scenario of multiple unlikely natural disasters hitting the same region again and again and again, all resulting in massive damage and high causalities. They used to call wargames and simulations of this scenario unrealistic... can't say that anymore.

This Super-Typhoon about to hit the Philippines can have geopolitical ramifications; weather often does. We have seen how weather influences piracy, but if you recall, it was the Tsunami of 2004 that pretty much wiped out all the piracy in the Strait of Malacca in 2004, and piracy at that time was as bad as Somalia was last fall.

Oh, and remember all that Chinese naval power that was supposed to be ready to respond to Natural Disasters? It is nowhere to be found. Watch the Pacific news commentary, a lot of people have begun taking notice, and are mentioning it. We may yet see it though, should this Super Typhoon slam into China...

And there is another Super Typhoon forming behind this one...