Coping with natural disasters

Britain has been ravaged by what is being called the worst floods in the last hundred years. These floods have affected nearly a million people and has resulted in losses worth billions of dollars. The entire Government machinery has been paralysed by the enormity of the catastrophe and the unprecedented relief effort challenge.

This scale of catastrophe and Government paralysis in its wake is not new, even in the rich developed world. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is the most infamous example of ill managed rescue and rehabilitation efforts after a disaster. In the case of New Orleans, the problem was compounded by George W's policy of packing the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) with his cronies, who do not have any professional knowledge or experience in such activities.

For long, natural disasters have been thought to be the exclusive misfortune of the poor, developing contries of especially Asia and Africa. Floods, landslides, earthquakes, drought etc are annual events in many of these countries. In fact, many of them are intimately linked in the disaster management study circles with specific disasters, like Bangladesh with floods. But increasingly, natural disasters have stopped discriminating economic and political boundaries, and have been affecting European countries and even the United States.

These annual disasters across the developing world are occasions for the western print and electronic media to decry and drive home the utter inefficiency and ineptitude of these governments to protect their own citizens. Now with the same story being enacted in their own countries and similar (in case of New Orleans, it was worse than the worst that Bangladesh Government ever managed) ineptitude becoming evident, questions are now being raised about the inherent nature of disaster management.

Having managed three major floods in Bhadrachalam (banks of River Godavari), one very big and another smaller one in Vijayawada (banks of River Krishna), my belief is that practical, field level disaster management work, both during and in the immediate aftermath, is a highly labor intensive activity with no substitute for painstaking and concentrated human effort. Both Bhadrachalam and Vijayawada, like New Orleans, are protected to some extent by flood bunds and levees with gates, whose operation and maintenance is critical in controlling water ingress during floods. I have seen many a sleepless nights spent by officials trying to manage these gates, so as to prevent leakages during floods. In this there is no substitute for human effort and continuous vigilance.

The difficult work conditions and the constraint of resources makes rescue and rehabilitation incredibly challenging. Sophisticated machinery and logistics can be of only limited help in rescue, rehabilitation and relief (RRR). The field level experience and commitment of the RRR personnel cannot be substituted by anything. Being vulnerable and repeatedly exposed to such disasters, coastal and earth quake prone areas in developing countries have established mechanisms in place to combat these challenges whenever they strike. Such mechanisms include both the formal institutional arrangements of the Government and the societal and community networks that complement the former. These mechanisms are irreplaceable and are absent in most developed countries without frequent exposure of such disasters.

While we constantly complain about corruption and Government apathy as compounding the problems posed by natural disasters, the situation in the richer nations confirms that we do not exercise any monopoly over these attributes. Sample this from the Independent (Geoffrey Lean: Get used to floods - the worst is yet to come)

Half of all housing built in Britain since the Second World War - covering a total area the size of the West Midlands - has been sited on land prone to flooding. Councils and ministers have constantly disregarded warnings from the Environment Agency about unwise developments. The consequences are plain to see; most of the houses inundated in this summer's floods have been relatively new, erected in the wrong place.

Yet, even now, nearly one in every six new buildings is being placed in flood zones - and present plans suggest that this will rise to almost one in three between 2016 and 2021. The Association of British Insurers wants houses planned for much of the Thames Gateway to have their living areas on the first floor to keep them dry.

To compound the danger, successive governments have neglected Britain's flood defences. A report by the National Audit Office last month concluded that only 57 per cent of them - and just 46 per cent of those most important ones, such as those protecting towns, are in good condition.

Worse, ministers have consistently refused to give the Environment Agency the money it needs to build enough new ones, causing vital schemes to be delayed for years. Last year, they even cut the budget. In the wake of this summer's floods they have increased it by a third; but this won't take effect until 2010 and will still fall far short of what is required.

All these factors mean that the number of British homes at risk of flooding is projected to rise from two million to 3.5 million over coming decades.

Replace Britain with India, and you have more or less the same situation here. Population pressures and scarce land availability have led to massive encroachments on river, canal, and tank bunds and even beds. The disaster management agencies are starved of resources and hence chronically ill-equipped. Flood and natural disaster insurance (cat insurance) is in its incipient stages.