Tsunami preparedness pays off

Strong community awareness and preparedness are being cited for last week's successful evacuation of more than one million Sri Lankans after a tsunami alert was triggered by an 8.6 magnitude earthquake off the west coast of Sumatra in Indonesia.
 
"People were well prepared on how to evacuate. Everyone knew what to do, what routes to take," Major General Gamini Hettiarchchi, the director general of Sri Lanka's Disaster Management Centre (DMC), On 11 April at 2:08 pm local time, less than an hour after the quake, Sri Lanka's Metrological Department issued the warning and a call to evacuate to higher ground. Two hours later a second warning was issued following an 8.2 aftershock.

The earthquake occurred 440km southwest of Banda Aceh, the city most impacted by the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, which left over 230,000 people dead across more than a dozen countries, including more than 35,000 in Sri Lanka.

This time, more than 1,500 coastal communities from Puttalam District in the west to Jaffna District at the very northern tip of the island were evacuated in less than two hours. 
 
Village level committees, set up under DMC supervision, were activated to oversee and assist in the evacuations, and on a national level the DMC office in the capital, Colombo, coordinated with district level committees and DMC district sub-units.

Nationwide alerts were sent out on radio, television and mobile phone networks, while the police and armed services were mobilized to communicate the warning to villages. At the same time, 75 tsunami warning towers along the coast were activated to set off sirens, Hettiarchchi said.

Although some towers failed to work property, the vast majority did, alerting coastal residents to the potential threat throughout this island nation. Many people had participated in awareness training and drills in recent years.

"In 2004, no one really knew what a tsunami was. Now everyone along the coast knows what it is, but more importantly, how to safely relocate," Hettiarchchi noted. The catastrophic tsunami served as a catalyst for the establishment of the DMC, with the Disaster Management Act coming into effect in mid-2005.

"Both globally and regionally people are much more aware now," said Bob McKerrow, the head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) in Sri Lanka. He had been travelling along the southern Sri Lankan coast when the warning came, and said he witnessed firsthand the orderly manner of the evacuation. "The awareness levels were quite high," he confirmed.

Since 2004, the Sri Lanka Red Cross (SLRC) has spent US$1.3 million on bolstering community-based early warning mechanisms by setting up local groups to assist in evacuations, mapping out safe routes and locations, and installing tsunami sirens.

The SLRC's Branch Disaster Response Teams (BDRT) were also deployed within minutes of the first tremor in eastern Sri Lanka to assess the situation and remain on standby to assist in evacuation procedures.

Within seconds of the first quake people sought information from all sources. "Overall the community awareness created helped people. Everyone who was handling the emergency was calm and in control of the situation," McKerrow said.

Residents along the coast said awareness programmes conducted by the DMC, the SLRC and other agencies had made the difference. "This time we all knew what to do, unlike in 2004 when we knew nothing and waited on the coast," said G S K Herath, who lives in the southern town of Matara.

 Despite last week's largely positive review, there are still issues that need to be addressed. "Traffic is one area we need to look at more closely," Hettiarchchi conceded. Several coastal cities, including Colombo, reported severe traffic congestion soon after the tsunami warning was issued as thousands tried get to safety.

Mobile phone service also needs attention. Post-warning mobile communication was poor, as networks became overloaded and getting a connection was difficult. This might explain why the DMC was unable to use its own cellular phone broadcast facility to send messages to close to seven million mobile users.

"The other important thing is to find out why some of the [tsunami] towers failed to react to the warning communication," Hettiarchchi said, adding that the DMC plans to increase the number of coastal warning towers from 75 to 100 in the next year.

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), in the last seven years, countries such as Indonesia, Thailand, India and Sri Lanka have invested heavily in improving disaster response capacity and early warning.

Source: irinnews.org

What Price Human Dignity?

Small farmers in Oullam District in Niger’s western region of Tillaberi, faced with their third drought in seven years, are being forced to consider bundling up their few possessions and leaving for good the villages they have lived in all their lives.

To better understand what is happening, IRIN visited two villages in Oullam District which has the highest proportion of its population classified as severely food-insecure, according to a multi-agency survey in December 2011.

In Talkadabey, (“poor person’s home” in the local D’jerma language), the Oullam local authorities say 75 percent of residents do not have enough to eat; and in Banemate (“health or prosperity must come”) the figure is 90 percent.

Grandmother Hani Issa was born and brought up in Talkadabey, where the residents are mainly D’jerma and small farmers. Poor rains followed by an attack by caterpillars in September 2011 had snuffed out any hope of a decent harvest. The men in Issa’s home left the village four months ago in search of work, leaving Issa to look after seven grandchildren.

“I have to find food for the children for another four months [until the next rains]… I don’t think I can go on like this. I will have to pack up, take the children and leave,” she told IRIN.

Ousseini Idrissa, an official in charge of Oullam town and nearby villages, said: “There are hundreds of people leaving,” adding that everyone had been aware that villages in Oullam would run out of food soon.

In 50 years since independence, Niger has been in a food deficit situation for half of them

Yacouba Mainassara, the village chief, said they had fared better during the last drought in 2010, when the government had provided wages for short-term environmental services jobs.

Dabey reckoned agriculture in Niger missed military ruler Seyni Kountché who died in 1987. Kountché had invested heavily in agriculture and health services thanks to the discovery of uranium at a time when global prices were high. But when the uranium boom ended in the early 1980s, Niger’s ability to fund development slumped.

“We need an irrigation system, good seeds and cheap fertilizer and then we can have enough to feed ourselves,” said Dabey. Most of the residents get by on remittances from family members who have migrated to neighbouring countries. According to the World Bank, in 2010, 2.4 percent of Niger’s population had migrated and sent US$70 million home that year.

When IRIN visited Banemate village in Dinghazi Commune, the children seemed reserved; some were exhibiting signs of malnutrition - bloated bellies, listless eyes and discoloured hair.

There was plenty of millet and sorghum available in the local market in Dinghazi, but affordable only for those who had remittances to fall back on.

Locals explained that some people migrate seasonally - between planting and harvests. Droughts and a rapidly growing population have forced many to leave their homes for neighbouring countries to support their families. “It is part of our way of life now,” explained the local official. But this year there have been families who have left seemingly for good, he added.

Underfunded appeal

Despite early signs in 2011 that Niger - and particularly people in Tillaberi, Diffa and Agadez regions - were going to need help, as of 15 April only 41 percent of the more than US$229 million appeal for assistance had been covered. Aid insiders say the appeal is now being revised upwards to more than $400 million.

Donors and aid agencies have yet to figure out how to respond between the time an early warning is sounded and when a crisis requires an emergency response, explained Peter Gubbels, who authored the multi-agency 2010 study Escaping the Hunger Cycle: Pathways to Resilience in the Sahel. 

Early response, such as cash transfers or fodder for livestock, can help to stop people’s livelihoods from collapsing and prevent people from fleeing.

Nigeriens nourish Nigeriens (3N)

People in Niger, the world’s second least developed country, have been hit by a series of shocks: regular droughts; four coups since independence in 1958; Tuareg rebellions; the Libyan crisis which affected remittances; and fluctuations in the price of the main export, uranium.

Photo: Jaspreet Kindra/IRIN

Children in Banemate were reserved

In 50 years since independence, Niger has been in a food deficit situation for half of them, says the 3N programme (Nigeriens nourish Nigeriens), the new government framework to make Nigeriens food secure for good. At the moment, 60 percent of households can only cover their food needs for three months, says the government.

“Our vision is to help ourselves become food secure. We were inspired by the previous military government’s initiative [which set up the Higher Authority of Food Security in 2010 to develop a food strategy for the country],” said Barkire Gabdokoye, the government’s technical adviser on 3N.

The five cornerstones of the plan, he said, were: develop production (land, fisheries and livestock); build infrastructure; improve drought preparedness; focus on nutrition; and create an enabling environment including legislation to make it all possible. Details of the framework are still being worked out. But Gabdokoye shared some of its features.

3N has all the ingredients of a respectable sustainable food security strategy in a land under immense climatic and population pressure.

Eighty percent of the population lives on agriculture and only about 12 percent of the land is arable. Most famers depend on rain. 3N has highlighted the need to develop irrigation based on the Kandadji Dam (under construction) on the River Niger, which provides the country’s only reliable source of water.

The dam is expected not only to help reduce Niger’s dependence on energy imports from Nigeria but provide irrigation to 45,000 hectares by 2035. In the next five years, Gabdokoye said they hoped the dam would be able to irrigate 10,000 hectares of land.

3N focuses on sustainable agriculture practices such as harvesting water; use of conservation techniques to grow drought-resilient millet, sorghum and vegetables; and the provision of subsidized fertilizer, seeds and fodder for livestock.

A big impetus will be on getting pastoralists to diversify (“but we don’t want them to give up on pastoralism”). 

“We want to build roads, improve infrastructure in the rural areas, make it mandatory for all villages to keep aside a communal reserve of cereals; have kitchen gardens,” said Gabdokoye. “We do not want people migrating to urban areas, which cannot sustain them. We are looking at value-added businesses such as cheese-making, handicrafts in the rural areas.”

Lack of funds

But 3N needs US$2 billion over five years. The government has put in $200 million. Niger’s main sources of revenue are foreign aid (which finances 40 percent of its budget), uranium exports and remittances.

In light of the European debt crisis the World Bank says it does not expect any substantial increase in funding for development in Niger. The reality on the ground is that it is hard to raise funds for long-term projects, said Oxfam's Gaelle Bausson. "More funds are allocated to emergency response/relief programmes which are more visible, more in the media.”

Revenue from uranium is not adequate to fund 3N, said Gabdokoye. The outlook for uranium prices is uncertain in the wake of the nuclear accident in Japan in March 2011, with uranium prices down $20 a pound since 2011, said the World Bank, which also estimates the shortfall in remittances d ue to the Libya crisis to run at about $42 million.

In 2011 Niger also had to cancel a deal to sell a stake in the state-owned telecommunications company, Sonitel, to Libya, which has left a $60 million gap in its budget.

Climate change

Meanwhile, scientists’ climate warnings are getting louder. Since 1970, West Africa has experienced one of the most abrupt changes in climate since weather data began being recorded in 1896, say scientists Gil Mahe and Jean-Emmanuel Paturel in the 2009 peer-reviewed journal Comptes Rendus Geoscience.

Mahe and Paturel, who studied rainfall patterns in the Sahel 1896-2006, concluded that drought was still continuing in the region even if annual rainfall had increased since the very dry period in the 1970s and 1980s. 

Source: irinnews.org

Sewage Good For Your Veggies????

Maria Saungweme, 42, an informal trader and single mother from the low-income suburb of Glen Norah in the Zimbabwean capital Harare, uses sewage-infested river water to irrigate her two-acre vegetable plot.

“I am not proud to say this, but I consider the sewage that is offloaded into the river a blessing because it makes my vegetables grow well and fast. I have been selling my vegetables to other vendors for years and am earning enough to take care of my children,” Saungweme told IRIN.

She said she had not received complaints from her customers, but admitted her family did not consume her produce, preferring instead to buy from other vendors.

Scientific research has found that consuming vegetables irrigated with sewage effluent carries health risks. A 2009 study by Jos University in Nigeria, published in the Annals of African Medicine, found that "people consuming vegetables irrigated with raw waste water are exposed to the risk of infection with ascaris, amoeba and tapeworm."

But Saungweme insisted that she was not the only vendor selling vegetables irrigated with the river water. “A big amount of the vegetables that you see being sold in most of the suburbs are fertilized by sewage flowing into the rivers,” she said.

At an informal settlement about 2km from Saungweme’s vegetable plot, about 10 families depend on the contaminated river for drinking, cooking, bathing and washing.

“What’s wrong with the water? My eyes tell me it’s clean and we have been using it since we started staying here in 2005. Of course, now and then some of the squatters from here die, but I don’t see why their deaths should be blamed on the water,” a teenage resident of the settlement who identified himself as Jeff told IRIN.

I consider the sewage that is offloaded into the river a blessing because it makes my vegetables grow well and fast

The inability to upgrade sewage systems in Harare and Chitungwiza, a dormitory town about 35km southeast of the capital, has resulted in the two municipalities discharging raw human waste into tributaries of the River Manyame which feeds Lake Chivero, the main source of water for Harare and Chitungwiza residents, Harare Municipality town clerk Tendai Mahachi told parliament recently.

Because of the poor reticulation system and inadequate chemicals, the municipality was able to treat only 54 of the 144 megalitres of raw sewage produced daily, meaning that most of the water went untreated, he said.

Harare’s sewage system “was meant for a population that is much less than the current one”, he told parliament. The capital is officially estimated to have a population of 1.5 million people, but independent estimates indicate the figure could be as high as three million.

In a recent report, Harare mayor Muchadeyi Masunda said 60 percent of the capital’s residents did not have access to clean water, and 10 percent relied on boreholes and unprotected wells.

Waterborne diseases

Between January and March this year, Harare was hit by a typhoid outbreak -widely attributed to acute water shortages and poor sanitary conditions and practices - with more than 3,000 people seeking treatment and Health Ministry officials reporting two deaths.

The effects of Zimbabwe’s economic malaise since 2000, which has seen hyperinflation and a rapid decline in social services, left a legacy where “nothing was working”, Mahachi said.

Since an outbreak of cholera in 2008 claimed more than 4,000 lives, the UN Children’s agency (UNICEF) in Zimbabwe and international donors have been helping municipalities purify water by supplying water sanitizing/chlorinating chemicals, refurbishing water reticulation infrastructure and sinking boreholes.

Read more

Growing risk of waterbourne diseases in rural areas

Is another cholera epidemic on the way?

Typhoid spreads amid water shortage

Making the water safer

Peter Salama, UNICEF country representative, told IRIN that the interventions were scheduled to end in June 2011, but that after an appeal from local authorities, they were extended until the end of March 2012. UNICEF is now phasing out the delivery of water treatment chemicals based on assurances from municipal officials that they could now supply their own.

However, doubts still linger whether local councils can go it alone; the government is yet to release a US$50 million grant it approved in February for the rehabilitation of water infrastructure and treatment.

Salama said boreholes sunk during the 2008 cholera outbreak to ease water shortages were breaking down or running dry and needed to be repaired.

“It is, however, not desirable to have boreholes as a long-term solution to water problems; rather piped water is the way to go,” he said, adding that his agency remained committed to promoting access to safe water despite phasing out purification interventions.

William Nduku of the Forum for Environmental Education, a local NGO, told IRIN sewage was not the only pollutant: “Contamination of water meant for human consumption… is not limited to the introduction of raw sewage into rivers but includes refuse dumping and industrial pollution that pose health risks and threaten biodiversity,” he said. 

Source: irinnews.org