Disasters

The advantage with hindsight is that even the proverbial fool, after the event, gets the chance of a lifetime to become wise. No, the event one is alluding to here is not the Chennai cataclysm, but the one that had ravaged Mumbai ten monsoons back. There had been a lesson in urban planning for all and sundry there; for coastal city Chennai, especially so. The Mumbai floods had been as much about unbridled concretisation and unabated corruption, as it had been about frenetic altering of land...

Memories of last year’s Uttarakhand catastrophe are a tad difficult to push under the rubble of amnesia. For the last few days, incessant rains have been wreaking havoc in districts like Champawat, Chamoli and Nainital. Landslides too have been reported from many places. A bridge that had been constructed after the 2013 Uttarakhand disaster has been washed away. It is not without reason that memories of the other day keep rushing back. The superficial reportage of the ongoing rains is there...

The floods of Assam and Bihar have certain disconcerting elements in common. For one, they occur every year, without fail. They devastate the lives of millions of people. Every year we hear of the respective state governments taking steps to mitigate disasters. News items about the floods don’t make screaming headlines in the mainstream Indian media. But worse, the hearts of Indians don’t quite bleed anywhere else for the trauma people here are subjected to. This piece is neither a lecture in...

Over 296,800 people died in 373 natural disasters in 2010, Around 208 million others were affected by this disasters, which cost nearly US$110 billion. The figures have just been released by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED). The January 12 earthquake in Haiti was the deadliest disaster of the year, kiling over 222,500 people. The quake had measured 7.0 on the Richter scale, and was followed by over 50 aftershocks over the next two weeks. The second most fatal...

The Brazilian floods that has claimed over 600 lives is deadliest natural disaster to have hit the country. This comes barely months after an unprecedented drought afflicted the Amazon region when water levels in the river's tributaries fell drastically. Torrential rains inundated a heavily populated, steep-sloped area about 40 miles north of Rio de Janeiro on Tuesday and Wednesday, triggering flash floods and mudslides. The disaster had claimed 610 lives at the last count. About 12 inches...

A year after the earthquake that killed over 230,000 people, women and girls living in Haiti’s makeshift camps are facing an increasing risk of rape and sexual violence. The January 2010 devastating earthquake was the beginning of a nightmare. For Guerline, her travails only began with the death of her husband and home in the quake. In March 2010, her 13-year-old daughter was raped by four men. She was threatened with dire consequences if she spilled the beans to the police. Scared even to take...

In October, the husband and wife pair of Munir Ahmad and Syeda, farmers of Laskhar Pur village in Pakistan's Duzafargarh district with their six children, should have been planting wheat. Only, they weren't for their four acres of land that normally produces two crops a year of cotton and wheat, had been damaged by the floods. They had tried hard to protect their fields by building mud embankments, but the floods were unprecedented. The flooding destroyed their cotton crop that had been close to...

A hundred days later, the litany of woes is piling up for victims of the devastating floods that ravaged Pakistan. Bad news is that the waters still remain. Worse still is the fact that aid is fast drying up. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), funding for the Floods Relief and Early Recovery Response Plan is only at 40 per cent of the requirements of USD$1.93 billion. An estimated 14 million people are in need of urgent humanitarian...

The floods that ravaged Pakistan since July caused an estimated $9.7 billion in damage to infrastructure, farms, homes, as well as other direct and indirect losses, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the World Bank (WB) have said. "$9.7 billion is almost double the amount of damage caused by the 2005 Pakistan earthquake," said Rune Stroem, ADB Country Director for Pakistan, on Friday. The two organisations made the estimate in their Damage and Needs Assessment (DNA), a survey conducted...

The damage caused by the flash floods in Leh and Uttarakhand regions could have been minimised or even averted had their respective state governments put in place warning systems to alert citizens of impending disasters which were predicted by climate change reports. The IPCC fourth assessment report in early 2007 had warned of precisely such climate impacts. The Climate Revolution Initiative has released RTI replies filed by the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) environment...