The task of First Response Radio is to set up radio stations to keep affected communities informed within 72 hours of a disaster. It empowers two-way communication, via radio, with affected communities in the immediate aftermath of disasters.

Teams have simple equipment that can easily be transported into any disaster area. They are trained to use the ” radio in a suitcase”. Training is delivered through a five-day classroom-based workshop which combines background knowledge about radio with the unique environment experienced in disaster relief work.

Participants are taught about the phases of disaster, the effect it has on those affected, and making radio programs specifically geared to disaster. After the training they experience a three-day field trial where participants are taken to an area which has suffered a recent disaster.

From a report called ‘The Feasibility of a Rapid Response Radio Unit’ published in May 2000 led to a launch in 2004

First Response radio has been working in many Asian countries over the past ten years or so including India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Palestine.

Today 25th of February 2025 I spoke with Mike Adams, one of the participants in this unique enterprise. I came to know him through my association with the Frome, Somerset  Men’s Christian Group which meets regularly at St. John’s church for breakfast and for Curry evenings.

It is designed for people would like to give their support by prayer perhaps donations and also for those thinking of working for this worldwide organisation in some way

If you want a brief summary have a look at a YouTube video or on the website where there are many informative videos.

Brian: How did this all start?
Mike: 20 years ago in 2004 we launched our very first disaster response in a radio station in the Asian tsunami of 2004. We had been thinking for a while – I should add that I work for the Far East Broadcasting Company Christian Radio mission  – and the international leadership had been thinking and wondering for a while whether there was a special role for radio when disaster strikes

As the name implies, the Far East Broadcasting Company works all over the Far East. The area has quite a few very disaster prone countries in proximity so we realized we had a presence and a capacity in some of these disaster prone countries. For a few years we had been thinking about ‘is this something we should be doing in addition to our regular faith-based radio programming’  of FEBC and if you see also known as FEBA Radio here in the UK.

It was the moment that the Tsunami struck 20 years ago,  it pushed this thought into a real action. I was based here in the UK as was my colleague Frank Gray and most of us remember where we were on Boxing Day, the day after Christmas, when we saw on our TVs what was happening on the ground in Indonesia, in Thailand, ultimately in India, Sri Lanka and other parts of Indian Ocean that were ultimately struck by the tsunami.

When that thing happened so I got a call on Boxing Day and my colleague said ‘you remember that thing we’ve been talking about for several years. Well I think this is the time to do it’. Look at the level of the disaster.  In the first day or two nobody truly knew the scale of it.

If not now, then when?

We said that if this is not the time to roll out the new idea then what is. If this doesn’t justify jumping in and trying something new, then when will a disaster more worthy ever come along?

It was a crazy place to start a new organization disaster response. It was going in at the deep end. It was like going to the Olympics and going for Gold while you’re an amateur athlete. It was way outside our league in many ways but as Frank, the Chief Operations Officer of the Christian Radio Mission said  ‘if we don’t start now when will we?’

Let’s start,  let’s do our best and let’s see what we learn and reflect on that and if it’s something we continue with, we will see how we could do it better. Frank was UK based but has worked all over the Far East within the same mission whereas I was on the international team.

What have we started to learn?

The tsunami hit on 26th December 2024, there was only a small team on the ground as in Ache Indonesia. That was ground zero. It didn’t make the greatest news. It wasn’t publicized because foreigners didn’t go there. The foreigners were all in Thailand. Most of the news in the video were stories about Thailand, but the greatest loss of life and destruction of property was on the tip of Indonesia closest to Thailand.

Our organization works in Indonesia. We have Indonesian staff including programmers, technicians and everything so we chose to be on the ground on Indonesian side of the disaster zone. Frank and I flew in on a plane and everybody that was flying in and out of Ache the first few days after the disaster were humanitarian responders, disaster response, UN agencies. You weren’t on that plane because you were a tourist, you were on the plane because you were a responder.

Our 72 hour goal has to be the priority of search and rescue. If you don’t start search or rescue and get people out from under rubble in 72 hours their chances go down. Another task is to start assessment on food needs and shelter needs and we always start our assessment within 72 hours of the disaster. After I heard a number of people say that, I thought maybe our future 72-hour goal aim should be that a radio station should be on the air and be broadcasting.

In our first operation it took us about a month from the time of the tsunami striking to our emergency radio station going on air. We realized that was a great result for our first ever effort but it was in no way fast enough.

Everyone’s information need is super high when all the other forms are communication are down in Ache. There is a high information need in the early days and we missed that phase. We didn’t get the radio on the air till a month later so the first thing that we learned is that you just have to be fast, and choosing 72 hours as a goal was a goal to shoot for.

Then we had to figure out how is it even possible. It was a seemingly impossible goal. How could it even be possible to get on the air in such a time frame?.

So I began to work at the program by looking at the problem backwards. If you’re going to do that you have to have all your equipment in hand already. You need to have trained staff all ready. They need to be actually in the country not flying in from overseas. They need to speak the local language of the community, so we realized that to fly in an international team was not a sustainable or realistic  strategy

A model becomes a reality

We realised we had to plan ahead before the next disaster, to equip and train the local teams that lived in that community or that country already and allow them then to respond  in the event of another disaster. So we became known as a pop-up radio station. So a procedure became my mantra.

equip    train    respond    and in that order.

Get the equipment, train the staff, leave the equipment there in the Asian disaster-prone country and so they can respond to any following disasters. If you try to respond without equipment they’ll struggle. If you just buy equipment and don’t train anybody, the equipment is worthless without training staff.

Equipping and training goes before responding and if you’ve done that then everyone says ‘it looks easy. look they did it so quickly. But it was always ‘easy’ after we put in the hard work of equipping and training a local team.

Often the local team will be in the Nation’s capital in Indonesia. The team is primarily based in Jakarta and then they would deploy out from Jakarta to any other province where disaster strikes. And so just to make that all possible we are developing a realistic model.

Components for the FM radio station

See what our equipment comprises and adhering to the rule that it should all go in suitcases of no more than 23 kilos so we can always fit it inside the luggage limit of many Airlines.

# One suitcase has the studio
# the second suitcase has the FM radio transmitter
# the third suitcase has the FM antenna system.  Everything from microphone to antenna of this radio station is in these suitcases
#  add to that a generator for power
# add boxes of radios to give away to the community

you’ve created a completely self sufficient communications system.

It doesn’t matter if local power is off. It doesn’t matter that the internet is failed and that cell phones are down. There’s no SMS texting. There’s no 4G phone. It has taken a slightly different form today after we re tweeked it but ‘radio’ and ‘suitcase’ has always been the first component of what we do.

For some people we are just known as the ‘suitcase radio people’ like we’re just technology and that’s all we do so they’ve missed the fact that the second phase training brings us into trained operational teams. The suitcase brand itself is nothing without training.

So a couple of comments about training.

We’ve been doing a 5-day training class, a kind of a face-to-face in residence training class in the Asian countries where we’re trying to build teams. The class takes people from a radio background and also people from a disaster responder experience base and trains them together, that they each learn from each other’s skills.

The course covers:

What does it mean to run a radio station in a disaster environment?
What do they need to know about the whole working of the UN organizational system and UN standards on humanitarian disaster response?

Disaster responders learn the essence of doing a radio interview operating a handheld microphone in the field and in other key radio skills and so we found it was really great – very rich – to have people from different broad perspectives all training together for these five days.

Brian:  and there are also cultural differences on how people communicate with each other this has to be taken into consideration too. Americans are very upfront and ‘out there’ and some people are taciturn and shy and we’ve got to get everyone in the same ball park.
Mike: Part of what you’re talking about is that thing things need to be localized so the first training class was always in English to train the local trainers. Once they understood the key principles they could put it into their local context. They came to know the right words and phrases to use,  they knew the cultural approaches to things.

What we were teaching them was not everything, it was the core essentials of the strategy of doing disaster radio. Then the Filipinos adjusted it to their culture,  the Indonesians equally, and the Indians likewise and so on the second occasion that the training class happened in a particular country the local trainers were running it. And then it wasn’t an English anymore then it was taught in Bahasa, Indonesia, or tagalog, Filipino language or in Hindi and so this is how it was possible to achieve localization.

We trained the best students from the class,  the cream of the crop, who were trained as trainers and then after that the classes were run in their local language by their local team leaders.

The costs are much less if you didn’t have to fly westerners out. No airplane tickets, no fancy hotel rooms. All of a sudden the price drops to a half of the original price when the locals do the training. Right now there’s a struggle for funds for humanitarian work in the disaster prone world and I think that our approach is super cost effective. You get the westerners out of the way as soon as possible and let the national team leaders take over and run from there.  It is not only cheaper but efficient and culturally relevant.

City classes and then field classes

So the in the training class we would do in the city people are staying at a training center. They are sleeping in a hotel, they’re have a nice bed and good food and then ….. we take the training out into the field. This would be something equivalent to an army field exercise. We would take the radio station to a  former disaster zone maybe years  years after. With the tsunami we went back to Ground Zero – the tsunami area – and ran our exercise there a place that had an earthquake previously.

We went back two or three years later or even as they’re still in the recovery phase and run our radio station in those former disaster zones and that’s where the students get to pull everything out of of the boxes, set everything up and within an hour the radio station would be on the air and operating from the time we arrived at the bus stop.

We would run it as a public radio station for these three days of our field exercise and because we were in a  former disaster zone you can talk about the disaster that was in the past, and it’s a real on-air conversation. You cannot have a training simulation:  do a public broadcasts and say today ‘there’s a disaster when there is no disaster’

This will go wrong even if you say ‘this is a simulation’ people will miss that and they’ll just hear ‘earthquake,  run for your lives’  and it’ll go bad, so we realized we didn’t have to simulate anything. We could come into a community that had been struck by a previous typhoon and talk about ‘do you understand the Typhoon warning system what does it mean to be level 1 2 3 4 or red flag or green flag or yellow flag ? They need to know so that they can be better prepared the next time the disaster comes.

The community would listen even though we were only on the air for three days. They would engage and they would text and call and visit the station even just over a 72-hour field exercise. We created a real connection with the community that the team began to  learn and experience the raw feelings.

They woould talk about what they need, listen to their feedback you get answers from the government’s office. We get answers from the UN agencies and we report back to the community what they they’re asking about and what they need to learn.

Brian: There’s no mention on your website of needing money which is a bit odd
Mike:  our larger far east broadcasting company has a donors all over the world who fund our regular faith-based programming and generally speaking those same donors fund the disaster response or disaster radio work as well so it has been in-house funded.

The radio scheme didn’t cost us a lot of money;  we learned how to do it very cost effectively and there were plenty of donors already connected to our Christian Radio Network that wanted to see the humanitarian work done as well.

The web page has the name of our Christian Radio mission, the first stage in the system is in the process of transition.

So, what did we learn?

Just to summarize our training: through providing the equipment first, the local Asian team in a known disaster prone country is trained to do disaster work using this equipment, which stays with them. The field exercise is very realistic and helps them to get the whole experience of engaging with the community and becoming very comfortable. During the field exercise they live in the field, they sleep in tents, they sleep in barracks alongside the police, they have field food.

It is not as comfortable;  they don’t get as much sleep. It’s a very realistic field exercise and so they when they’ve gone through that and they’ve done three days and they come out the other side with real skill and real confidence. They are like ‘I’m ready so  when the next disaster comes along I’m going out of the door.

This has been the big part of our success: Asian partners are trained and equipped. Up until the time last year. when I began phasing out in my current role.  The organisation had performed 40 plus disaster responses.  I have gone to five of those, so the rest of them are all done by the Asians without me. The international support was to train the teams and maybe walk alongside them in their first disaster response and at the second time third time then they say ‘we’ve got it Mike’

Creating this local capacity was essential, it would be impossible if you weren’t not to have built local capacity in local teams.

Future education plans

it would make sense to create an Academy, hopefully under the auspice of an umbrella organization in order to teach other people the recipes that have been learnt and particularly the provision of services at very short notice. This could be shared from organization to organization throughout the world.

Our attitude towards technology has changed

Mike: Communication is crucial, especially in the Western world where we have many channels. During disasters, even advanced countries like Japan struggle when the internet fails. Radio, though old-school, remains essential in disaster response as it can be self-contained and independent of infrastructure. We provide radios to people and broadcast 24/7 in disaster zones.

We can utilize technology to create accessible “radio in a box” kits for different countries. These kits are simple to assemble and can be built by anyone, reducing costs, size, and weight. Modern equipment and mixers, driven by the podcast and video blog industry, now include many previously optional features. This makes them well-suited for disaster radio, allowing us to leverage this advanced technology.

Our team operates continuously until things stabilize, then packs up and prepares for the next deployment.

We work alongside a lot of humanitarian organizations we work alongside UN agencies there are many many UN agencies with different focii and different functions and there’s one UN agency, the office of coordination and humanitarian affairs which is long word ocha.  Their website is here.

Brian: in a funny way you are working yourself out of a job
Mike: Yes. I spent 17 years working myself out of a job with our mission. One of the very first students that I trained was Maggie, a lady in the Philippines.  Maggie was in our very first training class and she is  now the team leader for First Response Radio so she takes the reins for me. When I passed the baton to Maggie we had some transition time face-to-face just recently and so now everything up and running.  Maggie is as passionate as me about First Response Radio.

My baby is safe in Maggie’s hands so that transition has indeed happened. So the Asian teams will now take the international lead amongst launching new Asian or African teams and Maggie is taking the lead so first phase is completed. We created this capacity within our Christian mission and I’ve handed that over.  I’ve successfully worked myself out of that job.

Brian: I’ve noticed that smaller organizations tend to be more efficient.

Mike: Absolutely, being small, light, and agile is our strength. We have cheap, easy-to-operate local teams, making us very agile. Large organizations, despite having millions in funding, are often slow to respond to disasters as they need to raise funds first, whereas we can act immediately. Even large organizations could theoretically build local capacity in advance across regions like Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Once you empower local teams, they can act swiftly regardless of the larger organization’s slower pace.

Brian: What about solar panels for radios? They’ll run out of batteries eventually, right?

Mike: I love solar radios. This one has a solar panel and a crank. I’ve been testing it with BBC Radio 4 all day, and it’s holding up well. We believe in sustainable power because if you give a battery-powered radio, you need to provide all the batteries. In places like the Middle East, it’s tough to get batteries, so we prefer sustainable radios. But any radio is better than no radio.

Brian: You’re starting a worldwide meme about how to do things, more powerful than you realize.

Mike: Communication is vital. In the Western world, we’re spoiled with huge numbers of channels, but during disasters, even advanced countries like Japan struggle when the internet fails. Radio, though old-school, remains crucial in disaster response as it can be self-contained and independent of infrastructure. We provide radios to people and broadcast 24/7 in disaster zones.

One woman in the Philippines found comfort knowing we were always there. One woman in the Philippines found comfort knowing we were always there. She said ‘I just hear your friendly voice. I listen to the music and know that you haven’t left and that gives me enough strength to go one more day

Our team operates 24/7 until things stabilize, then packs up and prepares for the next deployment.

Thank you Mike for your wonderful words and I really enjoyed talking to you on the zoom call

Brian