The New Nation - Internet Edition

Mostafa Kamal Majumder

Cyclone SIDR that hit Bangladesh with a hurricane core of winds could not be the worse to come right at the time of harvest of Aman paddy and the production of winter vegetables that had started becoming plentiful in supply and gradually cheaper. The cyclone followed two waves of big floods that hit the country in succession in August and September.

The three extreme climatic events coming within a gap of just three months and a half once again proved the vulnerability of Bangladesh to climate change induced by global warming that has beyond any iota of doubt been increasing the frequency and destructiveness of such natural disasters. But Bangladesh hardly has any contribution to the process of which it has been at the receiving end. In fact, for the hard work done at its instance to prove this climate change phenomenon, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the United Nations got the Nobel Peace Prize this year.

The cyclone ripped through the central part of the Bangladesh coastline with maximum wind speed of 220 kilometres an hour and all its onslaughts remained confined to Bangladesh as it moved from Barguna towards north before finally going northeast over Sylhet.

It was because of the Cyclone Preparedness Programme (CPP) that out of an estimated 3.2 million people who were considered at risk for falling on the track on cyclone SIDR, about 1.5 million could be evacuated to safety from surge prone areas. And the loss of human life and property is expected to be relatively less than what similar disasters caused in 1970, 1985 and 1991. Through 36 years of trial and error CPP has developed as one of the best disaster preparedness programmes in the world.

It was estimated in the nineties that about five million people live in high risk areas along the western, central and south-eastern coasts of Bangladesh. Of these, 4 million live in very high-risk areas. However, only 10 per cent of the actual population in the high-risk areas could be accommodated in existing safe places (excluding Sub-district headquarters buildings and cyclone shelters built outside these areas). Under the studies carried out during the period the construction of 2,500 cyclone shelters was suggested.

The actual need for shelters has increased as some shelters built in the seventies and the eighties are now located far inland away from the surge prone areas because the coastline has moved south due to land accretion. Field surveys conducted earlier indicated that the majority of the population living in the high risk areas are low-income agricultural workers of whom 70 per cent are landless deriving their livelihood from fishing, sharecropping or day labourers or as workers in shrimp or salt farms.

Past experiences show that safe drinking water is most urgently needed after such a cataclysm because water bodies that are used to harvest rainwater for use throughout the year in the coastal areas have all been filled with saline water while hand tubewells have either gone under surge water or rendered useless. The worst affected people need dry food for now, as they have neither utensils nor fuel to cook food. The injured ones suffering mostly cuts and fractures at different parts of their bodies need immediate treatment including surgery. The supply of antibiotics, water purification tablets and oral rehydration saline should be adequate to respond to the sudden high demand for those.

People who are still to locate family members separated by the fury of the cyclone and the associated storm surge need help to know the whereabouts of their kith and kin. The worst affected people now need building materials to rebuild their flattened homes, and piece together things to restart family life. The armed forces are doing the difficult immediate rescue, relief and rehabilitation activities in far-flung areas which have become inaccessible because roads in the affected areas have either been damaged or blocked by debris. The government machinery has been mobilised for relief and rehabilitation. It now needs to coordinate the response and participation of the whole nation to help recover from the colossal loss that SIDR has caused.

The Sunderbans, badly battered as it was by SIDR, absorbed part of fury of the cyclone helping reduce its destructiveness. Forest Department officials are yet to assess the damages caused to the forest and to the wildlife that thrives there. This natural barrier to sea storms reminds one of the need to strengthen the coastal green-belt programme taken up after the 1991 cyclone.