Urgent Call for Donations: Operators Without Borders (OWB) Respond to Hurricane Melissa with Valerie Jenkinson, CEO of OWB

[00:00:00] Jo Burgess: Welcome to the Exec Exchange, 15 minute podcasts in which normally a leader from the water sector shares a story with Piers Clark to inspire, inform, and educate other water sector leaders from around the globe.
[00:00:14] Jo Burgess: Today, however, my name is Jo Burgess and this is a special appeal edition in which my guest is Valerie Jenkinson, Founder and Chair of Operators Without Borders, who are mounting a response to Hurricane Melissa's devastating impact on the Caribbean. Valerie, I know you are incredibly busy right now. Thank you for finding the time to join us.
[00:00:35] Jo Burgess: We are seeing catastrophic images from Jamaica after Hurricane Melissa, from your perspective, what's the most critical, hidden threat to survivors right now beyond the immediate wind and flood damage?
[00:00:48] Valerie Jenkinson: We focus on the water sector, so we don't really know what the situation is. They're calling it the hurricane of the century. But of course, we're only at 2025, and climate change is making things worse. It was at the top of the scale of a category five. I think that they're gonna have to start going to category six because we are getting these category fives at the top of the level and there was winds over 295 kilometers an hour.
[00:01:14] Valerie Jenkinson: I was talking to a friend whose wife's family lives there and the water was over their refrigerator. There are whole areas that look like they have been wiped out by the flood. As in any disaster, communications is always problematic. Roads are down, communications are down. So it takes a little while to get a full picture of what has actually happened.
[00:01:34] Jo Burgess: It's unimaginable. Your organization is called Operators Without Borders, and you are deploying a rapid assessment team. So can you explain who your volunteers are and what their specific technical mission is in a disaster zone like this?
[00:01:50] Valerie Jenkinson: Yes. Well, we are part of the Caribbean response team. The volunteers that we have are, generally speaking, operators running utilities. They generally take holidays to go and help in situations like this. But we also have other water professionals who are disaster specialists. For instance, Kevin Carter who is running the WARN program, which is the utilities helping utilities in Florida that some people may be aware of. He has his bags packed, he has his passport ready and we are on standby.
[00:02:22] Valerie Jenkinson: As part of the response team, one of the things we don't do is just rush in because rushing in, we then become disaster tourists. So we wait to coordinate the effort with everybody else and make sure that it's orderly, it's controlled, and we're doing the right things and we're using the right resources because when you go in too soon or you rush in and you're not part of coordinated effort, you're wasting resources.
[00:02:47] Valerie Jenkinson: So, we have been asked to be part of the rapid assessment team, which is going in and taking a look at what the immediate needs are in the ways of equipment and such like that. Following that, we're asked to make a detailed assessment of the water utilities' infrastructure.
[00:03:03] Jo Burgess: So, when a water system goes down, what happens next? Can you paint a picture for us of the risks that families face when they can't get clean water? They can't get away from dirty water. They can't cook. There's no hygiene.
[00:03:16] Valerie Jenkinson: The humanitarian effort is always there. The Red Cross is a UNICEF Water mission, and they're well equipped to go in with bottled water and they set up reverse osmosis, and we've often helped them because we have such fantastic volunteers, we can help them set those things up, but it's not a long-term solution.
[00:03:35] Valerie Jenkinson: Our goal at Operators Without Borders is to restore services to the actual utilities as quickly as possible in both water and wastewater. Obviously, they have a saying in the Caribbean: "Everywhere, water is life", whether it's at the hospitals, whether it's the firefighters, whether it's just individual communities, without water, we are lost.
[00:03:55] Valerie Jenkinson: So, our goal is to get the existing utilities and aid them. We're the only, I believe organization in the world that does this and focuses our mandate on large water utilities, the majority of the people.
[00:04:09] Jo Burgess: Exactly. The idea is to get the utilities back on their feet again.
[00:04:12] Valerie Jenkinson: Exactly. And when we go, it's very basic. We are waiting right now for airports to open up. We are on standby. We've been told we have 18 hours to get to the staging area.
[00:04:23] Valerie Jenkinson: We've got people coming from Canada and the United States and travel in the Caribbean is problematic anyway, as you probably know. So we have to have the bags packed, passport ready and be ready to rock and roll because it's usually only one flight a day that can get us to one of the staging areas.
[00:04:40] Valerie Jenkinson: From there, CDEMA, the Caribbean Emergency Disaster Management Agency, we come under them, and they are working with the Caribbean Water and Wastewater Association and the Caribbean Water and Sewage Association.
[00:04:52] Valerie Jenkinson: And we have something called a thematic group. So Operators Without Borders is part of that thematic group, and we are there to lend high level expertise to go in and to fix things because my guys can just about fix anything in the utility. Now , If it's obviously completely destroyed, that's gonna be a different story.
[00:05:11] Jo Burgess: Can you expound more on the activities that your volunteers do?
[00:05:16] Valerie Jenkinson: It's mostly what is going to be here is going in and fixing the valves, putting pumps, laying new pipe. a lot of their pipe is overground, it's not buried. So you can imagine how much piping there's probably gonna be need. And we have these technical experts who are far better at describing these things, but they go in and fix it.
[00:05:35] Valerie Jenkinson: My area of expertise is more the logistics and working with the incident command systems. I'm a level 300 incident command trained, and so I can work with the incident command system that should be set up by the disaster responders, the first responders.
[00:05:51] Jo Burgess: Amazing. And the logistics to get people in the right places. Your operators are all skilled volunteers, as you say. They're donating their time, they're taking personal time off to do this.
[00:06:00] Jo Burgess: So what's this appeal for? Where does a listener's donation actually go?
[00:06:05] Valerie Jenkinson: We are not funded to get the people to the place. So we are responsible for feeding them and anything to do with their travel expenses. Unlike many charities, Operators Without Borders funds everything. So we rely on donations and we've got a little reserve, but I'll tell you, when you're sending 15, 20, maybe 30 people, we don't know how many yet, but that money will go in an instant.
[00:06:29] Valerie Jenkinson: We may be restricted by funds and we don't want that because this goes beyond Jamaica. The Bahamas may need help and there's other areas we can help in other ways remotely.
[00:06:41] Jo Burgess: All of this costs money. There's flights, there's lodging, there's specialized equipment, there's logistics.
[00:06:46] Valerie Jenkinson: Well, we are looking right now, apparently they don't have satellite radios. And communications is always one of the biggest problems when you're going to a disaster area. So we are going to Costco and they cost about $500 a piece. Now if anybody has some who wants to donate to us, we'd be happy to take those donations.
[00:07:04] Valerie Jenkinson: We don't usually take donated equipment because it's shipping, and there's other people that do that better than us, but do need communication.
[00:07:12] Valerie Jenkinson: When we heard that they hadn't got these satellite radios, I sent some of my volunteers in Ontario to go to Costco and price them out and to come back and say what have they got and how many can we get because we want at least three or four for the teams.
[00:07:25] Valerie Jenkinson: So when we send teams, we have a team leader. We have a lot of protocols in place. Everybody has to take a Prevention of Sexual Exploitation and Abuse course that's run through UNICEF. They have to get their yellow fever vaccinations if they don't have them.
[00:07:41] Valerie Jenkinson: So we are gearing up. We've had a number of people already volunteering to go, but we're saying, okay, we don't know whether we're gonna send anybody or not. We know we're doing the rapid assessment. We know we're doing the detailed assessment. Then we find out how many people, where they're going to go, what we need doing.
[00:07:57] Valerie Jenkinson: So not everybody who volunteers, we may have a need for. We may need more people than that. We don't know until we get there. But we're saying to them, go and get your yellow fever vaccinations because it usually takes 10 days to take in effect. Go and take the course if you haven't already got your PSEA course. Go and talk to your employer, make sure that they're okay when you leave. All this has to be set up ahead of time so that you are ready at a moment's notice to go and be a volunteer.
[00:08:25] Jo Burgess: When it comes to donations, can you give us a concrete example, what would it cost to get one expert operator to the Caribbean?
[00:08:33] Valerie Jenkinson: Generally speaking, we ask everybody to go for a minimum of two weeks. And that's selfish because the airfares is the same for two weeks as it is for one week, so we can get almost double the money.
[00:08:43] Valerie Jenkinson: The accommodation may be tents right now, we've been told that we may be sleeping in tents. For a woman of my age, that's not necessarily a great thing, but we do what we have to do, and what we've told people, you do everything willingly and with a smile on your face.
[00:08:57] Valerie Jenkinson: We also say, you know, if you are not in great physical condition, it may not be the best for you to volunteer because this is hard hot work and it can be quite exhausting.
[00:09:07] Jo Burgess: There's no nice hotel to go to at the end of the day.
[00:09:09] Valerie Jenkinson: Generally speaking, we' re looking at about $2,500 per volunteer to get them there on the planes. Unfortunately, there's very few planes that travel, and the airfares right now going into Jamaica are incredibly expensive compared with normal.
[00:09:27] Jo Burgess: For the impact that person's going to have, I think that's amazing. So anyone listening, if you, obviously not many of us are in a situation where we can do $2,500 by ourselves, but that's not a huge number. So only a few of us need to donate before we reach that kind of level.
[00:09:41] Valerie Jenkinson: If you are an organization that wants to sponsor a volunteer, we would be grateful for that. We would also be thankful for $10 or $20 dollars or how much you can donate.
[00:09:47] Valerie Jenkinson: I use the Obama Effect. When Obama got elected, he didn't use tens of millions of dollars in donations. He got $5 from millions of people.
[00:09:57] Jo Burgess: Many drops make an ocean. So those of you who are listening who can, please go to operatorswithoutborders.org/donate, and we will put this in writing so it's easy to click on, they need all the support they can get at the moment.
[00:10:11] Jo Burgess: Valerie, now speaking directly to the audience, what is your most urgent message for anyone listening right now who wants to help?
[00:10:20] Valerie Jenkinson: If you are in the water sector, these are your brothers and sisters in developing countries. And our volunteers tell me that going to work in these situations often changes their life.
[00:10:33] Valerie Jenkinson: Now you may not be able to go and be a volunteer but you can help because these people are gonna work hard. They're going to restore services, and we need your help. So please give us a hand and help your brothers and sisters in Jamaica and other countries.
[00:10:49] Valerie Jenkinson: And thank you so much Jo and Piers for helping us as always. You've been a great supporter of Operators Without Borders and we really appreciate it.
[00:10:58] Jo Burgess: Of course, this is a critical, literally, life-saving mission, people that survived the initial disaster often fall prey to waterborne diseases afterwards.
[00:11:07] Jo Burgess: To support the volunteer operators restoring safe water across the Caribbean, please donate now at operatorswithoutborders.org/donate. Every second counts.