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When a magnitude 9.3 earthquake struck just off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia in 2004, triggering a tsunami and killing more than 200,000 people within 20 minutes, Craig Redmond quickly joined the response, helping community members rebuild their livelihoods amid the wreckage.
It was an early, formative moment in a career spent responding to dozens of cataclysmic disasters.
Redmond is Direct Relief’s Chief Operations Officer and a humanitarian leader who’s spent more than 30 years working in Central and Southeast Asia, in the Caucasus, in the Horn of Africa, and elsewhere. He described earthquake survivors in Nepal staggering, grief-stricken, around a flattened village after the country’s deadly 2015 disaster, family members digging through rubble after earthquakes in Java, Indonesia, and Turkey, and anger turning to community activism and new safety measures after a 2009 earthquake near Padang, Indonesia, killed more than 1,100.
Venezuela’s death toll has risen to more than 3,600 and is expected to rise much higher as recovery efforts continue. In the coming months, indirect deaths from lack of access to healthcare and unmet medical needs will likely add significantly to that toll.
Direct Relief: What are some of the earthquake responses that really stuck with you? What did you learn from them?
Craig Redmond: To be there a few days after over 200,000 people lost their lives in 20 minutes during the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami changed my perception. Not only on what humanitarian organizations should do [during emergencies], but how communities can respond and how the international community can respond. Then in Indonesia, there were two other massive earthquakes soon after that: one in 2006 in central Java, and one in 2009 in Padang, Sumatra.
I also was part of an on-the-ground response after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. [Haiti’s cataclysmic 2010 earthquake is estimated to have killed over 200,000 people.] And responded in Nepal, after another massive earthquake in 2015, and in Turkey and Syria after the 2023 quake.
One of the commonalities of all of these was that they had this sickening way of bringing to the surface deep, deep grievances at the community level: problems with corruption, problems with poor governance.
Craig Redmond (far left), now Direct Relief’s COO, helps push a boat displaced by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami back to the water in a photo from that period. (Courtesy photo)
You have this first stage in which the earthquake happens and, of course, everyone bursts into action to try to save as many lives as possible. It’s an amazing thing to witness. You have people just running on adrenaline for weeks. Then the horror of what has happened begins to settle in, and then the anger comes right after that, understandably. Communities are trying to figure out, “Why couldn’t we get more immediate help? Why did these buildings collapse the way they did?”
Direct Relief: In those situations, what interventions work?
Craig Redmond: Nepal was one of those earthquakes that everyone kind of knew was coming. Nobody knew when exactly, but there had been organizations that had been talking about it for a while. At the time I was with a different NGO, and we had pre-positioned some equipment in the event that it happened. And then, sadly, it did happen.
The organization I worked with at the time was doing a distribution of basic materials: pans, blankets, that kind of stuff. We were also experimenting with cash distribution after an emergency. And I remember seeing the line of people; they’re really thankful about the pans – and then they’re going straight over to a shop and trying to sell some of them back.
And I realized, “Oh, OK. We need to help people in a way that gives them agency like cash does. It’s about finding some way to work with communities so that they can have agency and make decisions about their own future. When they’re at the worst moment of their lives, when they feel as powerless as they’ve ever felt in their lives, helping them get some sort of control over their lives is essential.”
Direct Relief: You said that in Nepal, people knew a major earthquake would be devastating, but of course they didn’t know when one might strike. We don’t have many natural disasters that work like this. We know days in advance that a tropical storm system like a hurricane is forming. We usually know hours ahead of time that a wildfire is a serious threat, and we can evacuate people, if not always as quickly as we would like.
But we only know that an earthquake is happening because it’s literally already happening. How does that change the way people on the ground are impacted, the needs they have, and how we strategize a response?
Craig Redmond: One thing I believe so strongly in, particularly at this point in my career and my life, is the importance of working with local organizations. That’s why Direct Relief partners with organizations on the ground. They know the situation better than anybody. Believe me, they know where the threats are going to come from. And [because of those partnerships], we are uniquely placed to have deep impact, particularly after rapid-onset emergencies like earthquakes. These local organizations are going to be the first responders.
In every one of the earthquakes I’ve seen, in the first 72 hours, it was mostly local organizations that were responding. In Venezuela, even the groups that could get there as fast as possible, it took 48 or 72 or sometimes more than that to even arrive. But the local organizations were there saving lives and pulling people out where they could. Building out their capacity and helping those groups is where Direct Relief is focused.
Then second, it’s about helping those groups to think through what resilience looks like for them. In the case of that area of Venezuela, there are hurricanes, and it’s an earthquake zone. So it’s helping those organizations to think through, “What will it take for us to stay operational in the event that something happens?”
That preparedness piece, and thinking through what resilience looks like, is a role that we can play.
Direct Relief: In Venezuela, we’ve built a strategy based on reports from partners, from regional contacts, but we also know from some experience what to expect in the coming weeks, and we’re planning for that.
Craig Redmond: We’re thinking about this emergency in terms of waves of needs. The first shipment we sent in had the lifesaving first aid supplies and critical medicines that are needed for trauma and other emergency issues.
Direct Relief is supporting frontline responders with emergency medical backpacks filled with essential medicines and supplies. Including Angeles De Las Vias seen here. (Photos courtesy of Angeles De Las Vias)
The second wave of things was really more focused on waterborne illnesses and those kinds of secondary impacts. Those are going to be critical. Then the hard truth is that while everyone is focused on the earthquake and the corresponding emergencies that it triggered, all the other medical needs just go on. Moms still have babies. People still have accidents. Chronic diseases still need treatment.
These kinds of disasters are force multipliers for all the other stuff that was going to happen anyway. We need to make sure that healthcare providers not only have the trauma supplies and emergency medicines they need to respond to the earthquake, but also they’re stocked with the backup essentials that they’re going to need, so they can continue to respond to what is going to be a long recovery.
Direct Relief: That touches on something that often gets overlooked in the media: Virtually every large-scale disaster has much broader impacts and causes much broader casualties than that official death toll suggests. What are some of the broader impacts that we’re preparing for? How will Direct Relief contain the scale of that larger spread?
Craig Redmond: I’m concerned about either the collapse of systems or the further undermining of confidence in those systems. We all know that in Venezuela, it’s been a tough, tough several years. It’s going to be very difficult for people to have faith. If there’s a time when you need to be able to rely on your own [existing] structures, it’s now. And our work is all about trying to support, as much as we possibly can, the healthcare system. We’re putting all our effort into making sure that they have the medicines and the supplies that they need, so the system doesn’t collapse.
Sadly, what begins to happen in many of these emergencies is that, some weeks and months later, the international community largely goes away. And that tough recovery period, when the community and the local government are left to try to pick up and get to some kind of normalcy again, that can last for years.
Direct Relief: That brings us back to that local focus. Many people do believe that it is big NGOs and international agencies who do all the most critical on-the-ground work. And those players are very important, but it is often the local communities themselves, the specialized regional responders, the local healthcare providers and leaders who have both the most immediate and the longest-term role. Let’s talk a little about that.
Craig Redmond: There is nothing more important than clearly identifying the key partners that you want to work with [before a disaster happens], and how strategically placed they are to respond to some potential threat. You form that close partnership with them so that you know each other very well. You learn what their needs are and how we can support each other.
Over time, many international organizations will pivot away. Certainly, those that are focused on shorter-term response will.
Emergency medical aid is staged for shipment to Venezuela at Direct Relief’s warehouse on July 2, 2026. The organization has been pulsing medical aid into the region in response to the devastating earthquakes in Venezuela over the past week and will continue to respond to medical needs. (Bobby Contreras/Direct Relief)
But local organizations are there for the long haul. They’re the ones who are going to stay through the recovery phase. They are the ones who are invested in a way that an international organization just will never be. We care deeply, but it’s not our home. It’s their home, so we need to invest in them.
A lot of international organizations have known this, but haven’t quite got to the point where they’re all in on that, philosophically. Direct Relief has done only that for a long, long time. Obviously, we work with international organizations as well. But really our main focus is those local organizations in the roughly 100 countries we work with around the world.
When you do that, the necessary trust is already there, particularly when something as awful as a massive earthquake happens. They’re able to tell us what’s most needed on the ground. And we’re able to say, “It’s on its way.”
I was speaking to a colleague the other day who was saying his group was about to conduct an assessment in Venezuela before they launched a response strategy. And I thought, “We have two waves of material medical aid already there.”
That’s the speed at which you can respond when you have a network of local partners. Our strategy is to think of those partners as an extension of who we are, and we of them. And if we have that, we have a global team that can’t be matched in terms of its reach and scope.
This interview has been edited for length.
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