ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´

There is a remarkable ink and wax drawing titled ‘tidal bore’ in the
Bangladesh National Museum in Dhaka. It shows hundreds of matchstick people
caught up in panic as giant waves break over them. A closer look reveals
that the waves have eyes and look like huge cobras in the act of striking.
It must have felt like that last month when, for the second time in 21 years,
more than a hundred thousand people perished in a tidal bore blown in off
the Bay of Bengal by a cyclone.

Bangladesh is a land of disasters. In the next museum alcove is a series
of drawings of emaciated figures all labelled ‘1943 famine’, when more than
a million died in what was then the Indian state of Bengal. Downstairs is
a wooden cabinet, the kind most museums put fossils in. This one contains
dozens of human skulls. The label, dated 1971, for the war of independence
from Pakistan, says ‘Genocide’.

What appears to set Bangladesh apart is a unique confluence between
unusual exposure to the violent forces of nature and human vulnerability.
Despite impressive strides made over the past 20 years since it was labelled
an economic ‘basket case’ by Henry Kissinger, it is still one of the poorest
nations on Earth. And it is the poorest who die in its disasters. As one
newspaper reported last week, while hundreds died when the cyclone hit the
poorer low-lying quarters of Chittagong, people from the the middle classes
living on the hills behind emerged from their homes unscathed, to watch
the bloated corpses float up on the shore.

As the death toll from the Bangladesh flood rose above 100 000, geographers
gathered in London at the Royal Geographical Society to discuss vulnerability
and response to disasters. The main contention of most of the speakers was
that disasters on this scale are as much acts of humanity as acts of God.
As Ann Varley from University College London, one of the organisers, put
it: ‘Disasters are just a big version of everyday hazards faced by poor
people.’ The unstated conclusion was that they required political rather
than technical solutions.

The description ‘natural disaster’ to describe a major flood or earthquake
is about as useful, and as misleading, as a doctor filling out a death certificate
with the words ‘natural causes’, said Terry Cannon of the Institute of Social
Studies in The Hague. ‘Such death certificates tell us nothing about whether
that person’s diet left them vulnerable to disease, or whether doctors failed
to diagnose a curable disease.’

The missing link is vulnerability. The point may seem obvious but, to
Cannon, ‘it is not getting across to policy makers or the UN’. Vulnerability,
he says, is all but ignored in the declarations made to accompany the UN’s
current International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction.

The emphasis on the natural forces behind disasters, he says, ‘fails
to distinguish the human causation of disasters; and encourages an approach
which seeks technical solutions’. For Cannon, technical solutions are a
way to avoid more fundamental political underpinning against disasters.

It is easier to agree on an aid package to build embankments that may
(or may not) hold back the flood waters, than to solve the question of why
it is that so many millions of Bangladeshis are forced to live out on the
islands of that country’s great coastal delta, on the permanent brink of
disaster.

Moreover, the technical fix may itself exacerbate the problem. Bangladesh
is about to embark on a massive programme to build embankments along its
great rivers, the Ganges and Brahmaputra, to protect towns and farms from
monsoon floods. As New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ reported (This Week, 11 May), only one
of the 26 projects promoted under this plan addresses the most serious flooding
risk to human life-coastal cyclones.

But more than that, the construction of the banks themselves will force
hundreds of thousands of people from their homes and farms. And when completed,
the works will leave vulnerable many more thousands who farm land that is
to be outside the new banks (‘The rivers that won’t be tamed’, New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´,
13 April).

As a critical study of embankments in Bangladesh produced by the US
government’s Agency for International Development pointed out: ‘Embankments
do not reduce floodwater, but merely move it (and) . . . will increase the
volume and ferocity, and perhaps the depth, of the flow that has to be managed
in the districts closer to the sea.’ The price of protecting inland cities,
such as the capital Dhaka where former President Ershad’s palace lawns were
inundated three years ago, may be further disasters in the delta region.
Of such things are new disasters born.

Lynda Chalker, Britain’s overseas aid minister hit the nail on the head
when she opened the conference that launched the Flood Action Plan 17 months
ago. She warned that ‘we must avoid setting up projects which effectively
control flooding, but which adversely affect the livelihood of the Bangladesh
people’. The fear is that the plan will do just that for millions of the
country’s poorest.

Large natural disasters have killed an estimated 3 million people in
the past two decades. Most of the deaths have been in the poor world. A
report by Earthscan, an aid information agency, noted a few years ago ‘in
1974, a hurricane killed over 4000 people in Honduras. A similar hurricane
in Darwin, Australia killed only 49.’ Nor is the situation likely to change,
certainly not for earthquakes, which rival floods as the largest cause of
major disasters. Martin Degg of Chester College says: ‘All but one of the
50 fastest growing cities in the world are Third World cities. Almost 80
per cent of these cities are exposed to earthquakes.’

But there are critics of this sociological approach to disasters; and
some of its protagonists do scant justice to their case. The victims of
floods, earthquakes and famines round the world will hardly be reassured
to learn from Cannon that ‘the global economy is the ultimate cause of disasters,
in my view’. Technical solutions (or technical fixes, in the jargon) to
natural threats are dismissed by Cannon ‘because they don’t challenge these
wider causes’.

The blanket assertion that the poor are most at risk from natural calamities
assumes that there are a large number of rich, rational people about, with
perfect scientific knowledge of risk at their fingertips, who are able to
push their way past their poorer compatriots to avoid the risky places.
Where the risk is obvious and ever present, as in the flood lands of Bangladesh,
this may be a reasonable assumption. Likewise, the poor of Rio de Janeiro
have clearly been forced onto the landslide-prone hills, where 300 died
in torrential rainstorms in 1988.

But the gas cloud that bubbled unannounced from Lake Nyos, Cameroon,
in 1986, killing 1600 people, could have suffocated anybody. There was no
class discrimination here. And did the rich have advanced warning of the
lava flow which belched from a Columbian mountainside in November 1985,
killing 20 000?

Because there are a lot of poor people in the world natural calamities
will tend to hit them. Sometimes it is no more than that, plus the fact
that weather systems in the tropics, fuelled by the Sun’s heat, throw up
more cyclones, hurricanes and tidal bores.

If the rich are so calculating, how do we explain why so many of them
set up home straddling the San Andreas fault in California? It is very far
from clear that they would be better placed to survive a large quake in
their condominiums than, say, the Mexican migrants picking the state’s grape
harvest.

A book just published ln Britain, Sixty Seconds That Will Change the
World by Peter Hadfield, argues that so-called quake-proof buildings will
not protect Tokyo from its next earthquake, and that the death toll will
be far in excess of the 140 000 who died in the Great Kanto Quake of 1923.
Yet there is no stampede to depart.

The phrase ‘class quake’ was coined some years ago to describe the impact
of a seismic event in 1976 in Guatemala, which killed some 22 000 people
in the poor rural highlands and slums of Guatemala City. The risk here is
that a single case will be converted into an immutable law by virtue of
a neat turn of phrase.

When a quake occurred off the coast of Mexico in 1985, its greatest
impact, Ann Varley told this month’s conference, was more than 400 kilometres
away in Mexico City. Moreover, it ‘accurately pinpointed the centre of Mexico
City-its tenements’. This, she said, identifies social vulnerability as
a prime cause of the high death toll, which may have exceeded 20 000.

But does it? On examination, the vulnerability looks much more like
a freak of nature. The resonance of the shaking did particular damage to
buildings between 9 and 13 storeys high-crushing to death most of the thousand
or more inhabitants of a sought-after tower block north of the city centre
and a similar number in a high-rise hospital.

The areas of the city suffering worst damage were roughly the same as
those that were hit by a previous quake, also with an epicentre off the
Pacific coast, in 1957. The reason for this was primarily geomorphology,
not class. If there was a sociological pattern in the Mexico quake, it was
that public buildings-high rise flats of varying rents, hospitals and schools-suffered
worst. In the shanty towns, houses were too flimsy to do great damage when
they fell. In that respect the poor did best.

It was a similar story during the Armenian earthquake of December 1988
in which up to 100 000 people died. Modern concrete housing built by the
communist authorities collapsed. But, in the countryside, buildings of traditional
design proved less lethal to the rural poor.

Tony Oliver-Smith of the Department of Anthropology at the University
of Florida has cloned the phrase the ‘five-hundred year earthquake’ to describe
the impact of the quake in Peru in May 1970. Despite recording a relatively
mild 7.7 on the Richter scale, the quake killed an estimated 60 000 people.
It would never, protested Oliver-Smith, have happened in the days of the
Incas.

The Incas, mindful of past disasters in the Andes, built their world
in a manner that reduced the hazards from the inevitable. Their towns were
small; settlements were perched on valley sides rather than on the more
vulnerable valley floors; their buildings were kept well apart, had thatched
roofs, low walls, avoided long overhead beams, and were well-pointed. And
the Incas kept large storehouses of food and other essential supplies scattered
around the hills.

‘The beginnings of the 1970 disaster were laid 500 years earlier with
the European conquest,’ says Oliver-Smith. Once the Spanish gained control,
native town planning and architecture were abandoned. Larger cities concentrated
the risk. Spanish houses had untied walls made of thick rocks, had second
storeys and heavy tiled roofs. ‘They were death traps,’ says Oliver-Smith.

One city in the 1970 quake lost a third of its inhabitants. Even those
who managed to escape their homes found the streets so tightly packed that
collapsing walls killed them in the streets. Finally, the relief supplies
were not where they were needed in the disaster zone, but stuck at Lima
airport. ‘The misery and death which resulted from that event were as much
a product of that nation’s history of underdevelopment since the arrival
of the Spaniards as they were of the earthquake,’ he says.

This is a gloomy diagnosis, but it does suggest that something at least
can be done about natural disasters short of overturning the world economic
order. More of the long-legged concrete refuges can be built on flood-prone
land in Bangladesh, and earthquake friendly houses constructed in seismic
zones. And relief supplies can be kept in the hills, ready for distribution.
Even the poorest nations can plan for disasters.

The Bangladesh National Museum contains an entire room devoted to traditional
designs of small boats. It is a shame that such boats are, in the government’s
eyes, pieces of history rather than part of the present. In a country crisscrossed
by waterways, the government’s development plan has emphasised road construction
at the cost of river transport. Thousands of flood survivors have died because
Bangladesh’s roads and airstrips were flooded and its government had no
boats to reach the dying.