Summary
Content
On 23rd October OCHA released a situation report. Main issues as follows:
- Dry weather over most of the past two weeks has led to improved road conditions, although access challenges persist.
- Some bridges remain accessible only to lightweight vehicles (i.e. Agu bridge between Mbale and Soroti), while reliance on small boats to traverse the expanse of water at Awoja bridge (on the main road connecting Soroti to southern Kampala) and the Toroma-Magoro road continues.
- To date, the WFP-led logistics cluster has transported a total 367 MT of food and non-food relief by air. This represents an eight-fold increase in the amount of air cargo moved in the past ten days. This surge has been made possible by the deployment of three MI-8 helicopters in the affected areas. In total, 49 inaccessible locations have been reached.
- 474 passengers (predominantly distribution teams) have been transported by the clusters’ operations to date.
- NFI storage capacity in Soroti is currently full following the arrival of additional NFIs procured by UNICEF in preparation for distributions. A temporary storage facility measuring 350 square metres has been established in Katakwi. Trucks can be parked at both locations in order to avoid unnecessary transhipping costs associated with offloading into warehouses and, in the case of Katakwi, to allow direct loading onto helicopters.
- The cluster also notes that both boats purchased by WFP for the floods response are operating at the Awoja bridge, assisting the local community, district officials and humanitarians to cross from one side to the other.
- The Soroti-based User Group for humanitarian air service in its weekly regular meeting has approved the Standard Administrative and Operational Procedures (SAOPs) for air operations. All UN agencies are invited to submit to UNHAS the list of staff authorized to request air service.