The government and rebels have agreed to extend a truce in the central Nuba mountains, a key guerrilla stronghold, which could lead to a wider peace deal, an American official, Roger Winter, director of the United States Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, said during a visit to Geneva.
One of Power's colleagues, Jeremy Konyndyk, a tall, phlegmatic thirty-seven-year-old former aid worker who runs U.S.A.I.D.'s office of foreign-disaster assistance, described Guinea's epidemic as being "at a managed point, but right at the edge of potentially getting into unmanageable".
Despite the devastation caused by Typhoon Koppu, however, Margareta Wahlström, the head of the UN office for disaster risk reduction, said other countries could learn from the timely response of the government and local and international NGOs, which mitigated the cyclone's impact.
"This is still a rescue mission, not a recovery mission," said Winston Chang, chief of the United Nations' office for disaster assessment and coordination.
Jeremy Konyndyk, at the time the director of USAID's office of U.S. foreign-disaster assistance, told me that it often seemed as if the Saudis were thwarting efforts to get food to Yemen's starving populace.
For weeks, strangers driving through town would stop at the post office to ask what sort of disaster had befallen us.
At Insignia/ESG, Dean J. Shapiro, the executive director of the company's Westchester-Fairfield office, said some satellite offices may take the shape of disaster recovery centers -- empty of people but equipped with phones and computers for emergencies.
For security reasons, some companies in need of disaster recovery offices prefer the isolation of a stand-alone site, as opposed to a city location, said Frank Tomasulo, a senior vice president for CB Richard Ellis, a commercial real estate services company.
Furthermore, to strengthen the local radiation emergency medical system, Radiation Emergency Medical Assistant Teams (REMATs) are organised to be dispatched to the scene at the time of nuclear disaster and to give advice to the disaster countermeasures office of the local government.
His predecessor, W. Bernard Richland, wrote to the City Council in 1976, describing the office as "decimated" and "on the edge of disaster".
