Role of the Thai Maritime Enforcement Command Center for Maritime Disaster Relief

Abstract

World climate has been changed dramatically over decades causing various impacts on human lives and environments. The man-made and natural disasters now are emerged more frequently and seriously both on land and at sea. A critical responsibility of state to mitigatethose disasters happened timely and appropriately is inevitable. However, the way to manage a disaster at sea may have significant challenges compare to on land one due to specific characteristic governmental policies, limitation of resources, and requirement of experienced man power. For many years, the Thai government has spent a great deal of budget to educate, train its officials or even in conduct various disaster relief operations under the National Disaster Prevention and Relief Act 2550 BE and the National Disaster Prevention and Relief Plan 2558 BE, otherwise those activities appear to be inefficient when maritime disastershappened.For maritime disaster, Thailand normally experiences suchproblems as a lack of disaster early warning, information exchange, agency capabilities, and authority to integration.
To deal with maritime disasters systematically, the ThaiMaritime Enforcement Coordinating Center, operated by the Royal Thai Navy, has been upgrading to the Command Center (Thai-MECC) with its authority to integrate governmental agencies as necessary, joint task forces, and trained personnel. Therefore, the aim of this research is to identify the role ofThai-MECC to prevent,manage and mitigate maritime disasters consistent with the concerning national act and plan.The result of this research indicates the role of Thai-MECC should be as follows1. The concept for national disaster relief should be comprehensive and realistic both in land and at sea disaster with an increase of participation of relevant agencies and stakeholders in policy process from policy formulation to implementation.2. The Thai-MECC should have its own obvious and effective concept for maritime disaster in terms of pre-incident preparation, situation assessments, and crisis action plansbased on the national disaster management concept.3. The Thai-MECC should play a vital role in response to maritime disaster as a command center for agency integration, command and control, and information exchangeas well as Thai-MECC Areas should be an incident command center in their responsible areas.In addition, the command and control structure for maritime disaster should be in a same as national level.