Waiting for a Disaster

By Nadine — December 21, 2009 | 2 comments

It’s hard not to feel like an ambulance chaser when you’re waiting for a natural disaster to happen.  Two months into the waiting period and I have to frequently remind myself why I started this project back in 2007.   My aim was to document an international relief effort to discover how a dedicated group of nearly 40,000 NGOs might be able to work together to mitigate human suffering in disasters.  With a production crew now on stand-by, our goal remains the same, and the grim role of disaster watch has fallen to me.

Living in southern Ontario I’ve been immune to most kinds of natural disaster.  In many parts of the world people aren’t as lucky.  Especially in Asia, where natural disasters are a way of life, and countries lie in the path of storm tracks nicknamed Typhoon Alley.

On average the Philippines sees 20 typhoons a year.  What I’m doing now – waking up each morning to track tropical storms, earth tremors, active volcanoes and other disaster alerts is what relief workers around the globe do day in and day out, religiously.  I’ve become partial to these warning sites:  Humanitarian News, Tropical Storm Risk, Emergency and Disaster Information Service.

With all of this information available to help us predict when, where and how bad; it’s sort of surprising that every year tens of thousands of people are killed or injured by natural disasters.  Cyclones are tracked for days and sometimes weeks before they run aground.  Tsunamis take anywhere from one to six hours to reach land after being initiated by an earthquake or landslide.  Floods, resulting from weeks or months of heavy rainfall, account for more disasters than any other type of natural calamity each year.   So why with so many early warning signs are so many people suffering?  And why do the worst disasters seem to hit the poorest parts of the world repeatedly?  Germanwatch recently published a climate risk index for countries susceptible to extreme weather conditions Top 10 At Risk Countries.  The top 10 are among the poorest countries in the world.

Four of the deadliest tsunamis in known history have happened around Japan. In fact the word Tsunami is Japanese for “tsu” meaning harbor, and “nami” meaning wave.  But a comparison of the impact of two recent Asian tsunamis one in the Sea of Japan and another in Papua New Guinea seems to demonstrate a clear link between poverty and disaster.  In Japan a 1993 tsunami killed about 14 percent of the at-risk population, where as five years later in Papua New Guinea 40 percent perished.  The difference:  the Japanese were educated about tsunamis, they knew what to watch for, and they had alert systems and evacuation plans.  Papua New Guinea had none ofthese things.  Yet information on tsunamis has been available for decades, Surviving a Tsunami – Lessons from Chile, Hawaii and Japan. If we had the knowledge then why did 300,000 people have to die in the Southern Indian Ocean?

All of this waiting and watching leaves me wondering…why do we keep making the same mistakes?

Front page thumbnail photo by Barbara Davidson.

Tags: Documentary Featured Logistics Nadine Pequeneza Natural Disasters