It is my great pleasure to be with all of you today and to be able to share some thoughts with you on disaster communications. The beautiful city of Tampere and the glamour of this Conference Hall, with modern communications facilities, provide a very pleasant setting for our meeting, somewhat a contradiction to the subject we shall be delving into. When I got an invitation to address this meeting, I did not hesitate to accept it because of the importance of the subject to the ITU and to me personally.
Disasters is a bleak subject to talk about.
But if some disasters do not affect us, all must concern us. They have, over the ages, occurred with much regularity and we can be sure they will continue to occur even with increased frequency if we aggregate man-made disasters to the naturally occurring ones. Recent disasters in Bangladesh, Costa Rica and Georgia are but a few grim reminders of the randomness of these disasters and the certainty that others will occur. I said that disasters must concern us. This is where disaster communications comes into play.