The British Red Cross has a mass sanitation emergency response unit (ERU), which can provide sanitation facilities and hygiene promotion for up to 20,000 people for a maximum of four months after an emergency.
©InfoWhen a major disaster strikes, the four-person team is on-call and ready to respond immediately. The team consists of a sanitation engineer, a public health delegate, team leader and team administrator.
Having set up the unit in 2007, we sent out the mass sanitation ERU to respond to the severe floods in Pakistan in July 2007 and September 2010, the earthquake in China in May 2008 and the cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe in December 2008. It also helped after the floods in Namibia in April 2009, the Haiti earthquake in January 2010 and it was deployed to Tunisia in the aftermath of the Libyan unrest in March 2011.
Read blogs about water and sanitation in emergencies