Syed Fattahul Alim
In the latest cycle of recurrently visiting flood in Bangladesh some 10 million people belonging to 2 million households have been affected in 38 districts. So, far more than 210 people have died of waterborne diseases and other flood-related causes. It is being feared that water-borne diseases like diarrhoea and cholera may reach epidemic proportions. Thousands of people dislodged by the flood are now living in flood shelters. They need immediate help in terms of food and medicine. Oral saline, which is an essential drug to fighting cholera and diarrhoea, is learnt to have gone dear in the market. The government has decided to deploy the joint forces to keep the prices of essential drugs under control.
However, the flood that took an all-engulfing form has started to recede in all the affected areas including the central districts where it remained static for sometime. In response to the chief adviser's call, donor agencies, local humanitarian bodies and individuals have come forward in aid of the flood-hit people.
Despite the fact that the recent floods often takes devastating turn, in the past, the people of Bangladesh would generally accept the reality of flood in a more or less casual fashion. That is because, people of this land since when they started to settle on this floodplain crisscrossed by a thousand rivers, marshlands and waterbodies, have grown the experience of living with flood. They knew that the monsoon rains fill the rivers causing their banks to burst and flood their settlements and croplands around. Keeping this fact in mind, they would build their houses on raised mounds of land and dig canals to allow flood water flow down the plains to collect in low marshy lands, haors, bils and other rivers until it found its way into the sea in the far south. Their entire livelihood, cropping culture and land use pattern were designed with an eye to the annual cycles of flood. True, in the past they suffered badly as the floods submerged their homesteads, dislodged them from their normal way of life, decimated their livestock and spread waterborne diseases like diarrhoea, cholera, typhoid and so on. Forecasting of flood was not as advanced at that time as it is now. But people in the past would still face the recurring meteorological phenomena of flood as a community and with popular wisdom handed down to them from their ancestors.
With the advent of urbanisation and scientific technology, people's awareness level about flood has certainly increased. They now get advanced information about flood and other kinds of natural calamities from remote, centrally placed information dissemination centres over the radio and television. Their flood relief, food, medicines, etc., come in helicopter and engine-driven boats from distant administrative headquarters. Naturally, they have by now got dependent on sources of succour and information which are situated far from their locality. The help and the knowledge to fight flood are no more available within their immediate vicinity, their own community. Meanwhile, they have about lost their community and its pool of traditional wisdom with which they survived for thousands of years.
Unlike in the remote past, the roads that now pass through their villages were planned and designed by people who come from afar. They have no more any say about whether they need the road and if so which way that should that pass. They are never consulted about the bridges built, dams and embankments constructed around their locality. Because its sounds preposterous that these simple, ignorant people living in the rural backwater can have anything to say about these high profile projects conceived and designed by people bursting at their seams with knowledge of modern science and technology, of big money and management. What have the poor, half-fed and illiterate rustics to tell them where and how to build a road, a dam, a bridge, an embankment or dig a canal? So, the rural people simply look on when these construction activities go on within their own localities, their familiar environment.
The outcome is for everyone to see.
They have learnt to depend for about everything on the remote centre so much so that unlike their forefathers they cannot fight flood or other natural calamities on their own. The roads, dams and embankments built and the canals dug without asking them have now proved to be their Job's comforter. The floods now take unprecedented turn, keep their homesteads and croplands under water for too long and they become totally helpless in the face of this familiar, recurrent natural phenomenon. Even the very modern flood and disaster management techniques often prove to be inadequate to face the recent floods.
However, the latest Bangladesh flood is not an isolated phenomenon. In fact, the entire South Asia, of which Bangladesh is a part, is the grip of an unprecedented flood.
Some 20 million people have been dislodged in the wake of the worst floods for years that have inundated vast areas of South Asia including northern part of India, Bangladesh and Nepal.
Roads have been washed away and hundreds of villages have been cut off by swollen rivers.
Hundreds of thousands of people across the affected area are at risk from hunger and disease.
Heavy monsoon rains are largely responsible for the recent deluge in this part of the world. It has been raining heavily in the region for 20 days. Some rivers have seen their levels rise nine or 10 metres, swamping embankments and submerging huge tracts of land. So far, more than 1,000 people have died across South Asia since the start of the annual monsoon in mid-June.
In some areas, the floods are being called the worst in living memory.
The bulk of the rain is now expected in central India, a region which has so far received a weaker monsoon. Already parts of the state of Maharashtra are waterlogged.
In Assam, in north-eastern India , three feet of rain fell in July. People in the state have clashed with police in their desperation for food, shelter and medicine.
In Uttar Pradesh the army was called in to evacuate 500 villages.
The two worst affected districts are reported to be Gorakhpur and Kushinagar, although water levels in major rivers there are reported to have stopped rising for the moment.
At least 121 relief camps and 34 cattle camps have been set up in the flood-affected areas of Bihar.
In Nepal, several rivers that flow down from the Himalayas have burst their banks in the heavily populated and low-lying Terai region that borders Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.
The country's Red Cross says a quarter of a million people have been affected by rains.
There have been deadly landslides in the highlands and floods have hit dozens of districts in the low-lying Terai region. The scenario
Floods visiting different parts of the globe fall into a pattern.
As communities around the world battle severe floods in living memory, experts warn such events may become more frequent due to climate change Recent weeks have seen a string of such disasters around the globe.
Parts of China had the heaviest rainfall since records began, killing more than 700 so far this year. Some 770 people have been killed by flooding in South Asia, with hundreds of thousands displaced by flash floods in southern Pakistan.
Pakistan, for example, was hit by flood before it could prepare itself for the calamity.
In other parts of the world the story was not different.
Thousands fled homes in northern England as the water rose. More than 50 people were killed in Sudan last week. In Colombia, slums disappeared under rising floodwaters and some 50,000 people were displaced.
Meteorologists say, worldwide floods are linked to each other.
Many scientists say the world is warming because of carbon emissions from human activity, making weather more unpredictable.
Floods killed more than 7,000 people in the world last year, which is a third of all victims of natural catastrophes such as storms, earthquakes, droughts and extreme cold or heat.
Models on flood forecasting
Scientists have been investigating the effects of a 7m-high wave travelling up the Thames, using computer simulations.
The wave was produced by a "virtual storm" as part of a £6.5m project at the UK Met Office.
The Environment Agency also used the models to test the effectiveness of London's flood defences.
The "extreme, hypothetical storm" created by the group allowed it to test forecasting systems and mathematical models of floods.
The next two projects will simulate a flood on the River Severn and one in the centre of Glasgow.
However, by using the larger than life model, scientists were able to create the 7m (23ft) wave, the worst of 24 equally possible outcomes.
The wave was approximately three times the size of one that washed into London in 1953, which killed more than 300 people and prompted the construction of the Thames barrier.
"This event that we deliberately created would have probably overtopped the barrier and would have overtopped most of the defences all the way up the river," said Professor Ian Cluckie, chairman of the FRMC.
He added a note of caution that the simulation was "very, very extreme" and that the likelihood of it ever happening was incredibly small.
However the research will help refine flood forecasting techniques and allow scientists to better understand the uncertainties of the weather system in the future.
This is vital as climate change affects sea level and weather patterns, complicating the picture further.
Researches will continue to face the natural calamities like flood, hurricane, tsunami and the like. Science must come in aid of man in the face of natural disasters. But when nature strikes back with all its fury, science, too, may become helpless. The interventionist approach to solve all the problems of natural and human origin is also not the final answer. People need also to correct their way of life and try to become part of the natural system they were born into. Hostility with nature does not pay in the long run. What is more, one needs also to listen to the ancient wisdom of humanity with which man has lived for thousands of year before the advent of the modern technology-based intervention-happy era of science.
Facing floods locally and globally
FE Team | Published: August 11, 2007 00:00:00 | Updated: February 01, 2018 00:00:00
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