This oblique aerial view of the landslide that buried Colonia Las Colinas is from the U.S. Geological Survey web page on the damaging landslides in Central America following the earthquake of January 13. PHOTOGRAPH BY EDWIN HARP, U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY
			Disasters: What the United Nations and Its World Can Do By Ben Wisner
	Related Links Radix --Radical Interpretations of Disaster Some Root Causes of Disaster Vulnerability in Gujarat		FEBRUARY 12, 2001--Ironically, it was during a decade dedicated to reducing the loss from natural disaster (1990-99), that we have seen some of the worst losses of human life and largest economic losses in living memory. Hurricanes and cyclones took large tolls in South Asia, the Philippines, Central America, the Caribbean, and the U.S. There has been unprecedented flooding in Europe, China, Venezuela, and the U.S.. Earthquakes in Turkey, Japan, and Taiwan cost a surprising number of lives, and, together with the Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles, cost billions. The combined cost of disasters world wide, according to the Center for Epidemiology of Disaster in Belgium, was U.S.$741 billion between 1990 and 1999. Human lives lost during this period were 589,000, and the number of deaths has climbed each year since 1994. These are officially reported deaths, it must be remembered, so the actual number could be even higher. Now, just as that decade of intensive scientific activity and public discussion of disasters has come to an end, we witness the same old story: an earthquake in Central America, the 18th damaging one since 1990. The toll is tragically familiar: more than 700 dead, 2000 missing, thousands of homes demolished, two fifths of all hospital capacity destroyed, one fifth of all school buildings rendered unusable. In India, the scenario was repeated on an even greater scale in the state of Gujarat. Twelve thousand bodies have been recovered from the ruins of apartment houses, hospitals, and smaller residences. The final number could reach 100,000, an estimate given by India's Ministry of Defense. An area the size of Wales or West Virginia has been reduced to rubble as if it had been bombed. Terrible Losses Not Necessary It is not part of the human condition to be buried under a landslide triggered by an earthquake. Earthquakes happen. But the disaster follows because of human action and inaction. In the case of the middle-income neighborhood of Las Colinas in Santa Tecla, just outside the capital, San Salvador, 400 homes were lost beneath a wall of debris from a collapsing slope above. This was not an "act of God." Road building, deforestation, and property development on the slope above Las Colinas should never have been allowed. These activities in a high-risk environment almost certainly contributed to the instability of the steep slope. A group of Las Colinas residents and environmental groups was in court only last year to stop development on that slope and the ridge above. The judge ruled against them. Experts agree that steep slopes made of volcanic soil are unstable. Geologists know this. Planners know this. It is not an "act of God" that no more than 10 percent of the multistory structures in Indian cities are built according to earthquake-resistant norms. The earthquake didn't kill, but the buildings did. The buildings go up rapidly with little planning and inspection in a boom economy like Gujarat's. A study commissioned by the Indian government warned in 1998 about the lack of compliance with building codes throughout India, but especially in the zones, such as Gujarat, where seismic risk is high. In El Salvador and Gujarat both the poor and the middle class suffered. In both places, hungry rural people have been migrating in search of work to cities like San Salvador, Ahmedabad, and Bhuj. They become squatters who live in makeshift dwellings in some of the most potentially dangerous areas in an earthquake. They have little or nothing to invest in making their homes safer, and little incentive because they don't own the land where they've built. In San Salvador and Ahmedabad alike, the middle class is attracted to the rapidly growing edge of the sprawling cities. Developers and contractors rush to fill the market demand, often in too much haste to observe building codes. This is where the landslide buried hundreds in Las Colinas, and where new apartment houses for Ahmedabad's salaried workers came crashing down. In both recent earthquakes hospitals either collapsed, killing patients and staff, as in the city of Bhuj in Gujarat, or they became useless because of damage. The main medical laboratory in El Salvador's capital is unable to function because bottles holding chemicals for medical tests were not secured on their shelves with simple restraints of the kind that are used on boats. Forty percent of El Salvador's health-care facilities suffered disabling damage. Yet is it well known how to protect health-care structures and their nonstructural elements. What the United Nations Has Done In 1990 many agencies within the U.N. joined with other international scientific and humanitarian organizations, national committees, nongovernmental organizations, and citizen groups in an effort called the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR). The period 1990-99 was one of accelerated and intensive international exchange of scientific information. More than enough knowledge was generated, refined, debated, systematized, and disseminated to have prevented the loss of life in the landslide in Las Colinas. That knowledge could have dramatically reduced the number of lives claimed in Gujarat, and it certainly could have protected priority infrastructure such as schools and hospitals. Going into the IDNDR, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), had already begun to accumulate a vast amount of detailed advice about protecting hospitals. They were spurred on by the collapse of two major hospitals in Mexico City in 1985. One had been the principal maternity hospital. The world still remembers images of the handful of "miracle babies" who were rescued from under the massive concrete slabs. Three large volumes of guidelines are available gratis from PAHO in Spanish and Portuguese. Why, one must ask, wasn't this knowledge put to use in El Salvador, and, by extension through the rest of the World Health Organization, applied to the major civilian hospital in Bhuj? During the IDNDR schools were also a priority focus. UNESCO had a program for strengthening schools, and the Organization of American States has an initiative that is attempting to do the same. In its last five years the IDNDR gave much attention to public education, and in its last three years it developed a comprehensive project for urban-earthquake-risk reduction called Risk Assessment Tools for Diagnosis of Urban Areas Against Seismic Disasters (RADIUS). Nine pilot cities took part, with another 84 associate cities. Where it worked best, as in Tijuana, Mexico, and Izmir, Turkey, there was strong support from the local administration and many local universities and professional groups. The project developed a low-cost method of anticipating urban-earthquake damage and loss and a model for creating an action plan to mitigate the losses. Tijuana is about the same size as San Salvador. The distance between them is not great. The language is the same. Why, one has to wonder, were the methods developed by RADIUS in Tijuana not applied in San Salvador? In part the answer is that a terrible civil war raged in El Salvador until 1992. Since the end of that war UN agencies have been involved with postwar recovery and in building the civilian administrative, legislative, and judicial institutions necessary for maintenance of peace and good governance. These same institutions are necessary to apply existing knowledge to reducing the impacts of earthquakes and other extreme events such as the 1998 hurricane Mitch. After hurricane Mitch, El Salvador was in an ideal position to make a quantum leap in its preparedness for not only the next hurricane, but the next earthquake, volcanic eruption, or season of extreme El Nino weather. El Salvador had not suffered the extreme devastation of Honduras and Nicaragua, yet it was an integral part of new-donor attention in Central America to making mitigation of risk a mainstream part of planning. Good urban planning, good land use, and environmental management--what one might call sustainable development--were encouraged by institutions like the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank, and the Stockholm group of donors. If knowledge, institutions, and finance were available, what else has been missing in El Salvador, in India, and elsewhere in the world where disasters continue to plague humanity? What More Could the UN Do? UN agencies have provided three kinds of things so far: technical knowledge, support for institution building, and financial assistance through grants and loans. These are necessary, but they are not sufficient to initiate the sea change in how nations deal with natural hazards. The missing ingredient is the kind of moral imperative that can mobilize local political will. It is when the world at large agrees to standards of responsibility by nation states toward their citizens in the form of treaties, covenants, and other agreements, that this kind of moral force is felt most strongly. Why then not set our sights on an international treaty that commits governments around the world to apply low-cost solutions based on available knowledge to prevent such tragic loss? Existing networks of scientists and engineers could take on the technical work of defining the standards. The networks were created in part by the IDNDR in 10 years of scientific exchange mandated by the United Nations. However, the international decade left unfinished business. Science was exchanged all right, but generally it hasn't been applied. Such an effort would require thousands of experts to work out the low-cost minimum practices required to avoid further such tragedies. Scientists and engineers would have to sit down with lawyers, legislators, and policy experts to work out how the minimum standards would be enforced. The devil is in the details, but scientists and lawyers eat details for breakfast. This is not an impossible task. It has been performed before. A recent example--known as the Sphere Project--is exchange among hundreds of agencies that work in humanitarian and disaster relief that led to agreement on a very detailed set of minimum technical standards for relief. The project's published document covers food, water, shelter, health care, and many other aspects of relief. Internationally agreed-upon safety standards already exist for many industries, including the chemical industry, airline industry, and nuclear-power industry. Concerning global warming, the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has mobilized thousands of scientists, and their work has gone into the treaty-making process that led to the Kyoto Accord on greenhouse gas emissions. Could the UN not create a parallel Intergovernmental Panel on Natural Disaster that would, in a similar way, act to mobilize existing knowledge and feed it into a treaty-making process? Such a body is necessary because so many different kinds of knowledge and expertise is required. No single existing specialized agency of the U.N.--such as UNESCO, UNEP, WHO, or WMO--cover all the specialist knowledge that would be required. That is one of the reasons that the IPCC was created. Preparing for the impacts of global warming requires many kinds of knowledge from areas such as public health, economics, agriculture, and oceanography besides expert understanding of world and regional climate. What is to be done during the many years that such a treaty would be in the making? The beauty of this process is that the low-cost solutions will filter out into society. Citizens groups will demand action by their governments, as they did in Turkey when it became clear that contractors hadn't followed building codes and had used low-quality materials, and in South Florida when it came to light that poor construction methods were responsible for much avoidable damage in hurricane Andrew. Prevention of disasters has to come from the bottom up as well as from the top down. Absolute safety is not a human right. Safety from avoidable loss, injury, and death is. Nothing in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights makes much sense if the human beings who are supposed to enjoy the rights can be snuffed out because a government neglected to enforce its own building codes. ______________ The copyright to "Disasters: What the United Nations and Its World Can Do" belongs to Ben Wisner and the UN Chronicle, which will publish the article in March. This prepublication version appears on Oberlin Online--because of the timeliness of this humanitarian issue--by special permission of Wisner and the UN Chronicle.
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