Monsoon flood - a man-made disaster?

Nearly 3,000 people are still stranded by the monsoon floods in India’s Uttarakhand state, while more than 800 have been killed.  The rains are believed to be the heaviest in 80 years, and have swept away entire villages, while 100,000 people have had to be rescued.

Now there are claims that this has been a man-made and not a natural disaster.  Critics maintain that the root of the problem is the unchecked building of roads, hotels, blocks of flats, and hydroelectric dams.  

This has made the floodwaters more deadly as they have become laden with thousands of tons of silt, boulders and debris, while the escape routes they took in the past down streams and ravines have been blocked.

It is said that the Uttarakhand Disaster Management Authority, formed in October 2007, has never actually met, and that that there were no emergency evacuation plans.  Similarly, modestly priced radar-based technology that could have forecast cloudbursts was never installed.

Indian monsoon death toll rises

The death toll in India’s monsoon floods has now reached at least 600, and may eventually get as high as 1,000. 40,000 people are still stranded in the mountains of Uttarakhand state, the worst hit area.

The early monsoon rains are said to be the heaviest in 60 years, and with more downpours expected, search and rescue efforts are being stepped up. 33,000 people have been saved so far, but the terrain is difficult, and roads and bridges have been washed away.

These are likely to be the deadliest monsoon floods in India since 2008 when more than 2,400 people were killed between June and September in Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Bihar.

Perhaps the worst monsoon flood ever in India came in 1978 when up to 15,000 people were killed, and more than 40 million were driven from their homes.  The disaster was made worse by a cyclone.

Deadly monsoon flood

Monsoon floods in northern India have now killed at least 138 people.  Officials in the state of Uttarakhand, famous for its many Hindu temples, said they were the worst ever known in the area.

Three thousand troops have been deployed to help with the rescue effort, as landslips and flash floods have been making the situation worse, and more rains are forecast from June 22. Twelve thousand pilgrims are stranded at the shrine of  Badrinath.

Because of rising river levels, more than 40 villages have been evacuated. Roads have been closed and crops destroyed, and there are fears of food shortages and possibly disease as bodies are left unburied.

Last August up to 50 people were killed in Uttarakhand when heavy rains triggered a series of flash floods.

Monsoon floods strike India

Last week (June 28), I blogged about the floods in Bangladesh.   Now it has been revealed that monsoon floods in India have claimed more than 230 lives.  India’s Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, has described the floods as among the worst of recent years.   In some areas, they are said to me the most severe in more than 60 years.

At least 95 people have been killed, and nearly 2 million made homeless in Assam in the far north-east of the country.   The Brahmaputra river has overflowed, inundating more than 2,000 villages and destroying many homes.

Most of the victims were swept away by the waters, though 16 were reported to have been buried by landslides unleashed by the heavy rains.   Nearly half a million people are now living in relief camps, while some are simply taking shelter on higher ground.

Military helicopters have been dropping drinking water and food, while soldiers are using speedboats to rescue people stranded on rooftops.   The government has announced immediate aid of $90m for the stricken areas.

Bangladesh flood

After some of the heaviest rain Bangladesh has suffered in years, floods and landslides have killed at least 70 people, and left another 200,000 homeless.     Eighteen inches of rain are said to have fallen in the port of Chittagong in just 24 hours.

At least 15 people died there, while another 30 perished in Bandarban to the south-east.  The authorities fear more people may be trapped under mud, and rescue efforts are continuing to find and free them.

In Sylhet in the north-east of the country, house roofs are three feet beneath the water, and local people have had to scramble up onto high ground, or take refuge in boats.   Districts around the capital, Dhaka, have also been inundated.

A monsoon flood in Bangladesh is said to have killed nearly 29,000 in 1974, though some of these may have perished in the famine that followed.    It happened less than four years after the deadliest cyclone in history killed perhaps half a million of its people. 

Thailand floods

More than 250 people have now been killed in the monsoon floods that have been affecting Thailand for the last two months.    Twenty-eight provinces have suffered, and more than two million people have had their lives disrupted.

These are said to be the worst floods in half a century, and the Prime Minister has warned that parts of Bangkok will soon be under water.     In some areas, people have been told to beware of crocodiles which have escaped from farms.

Last year saw monsoon floods across 38 provinces of Thailand, and more than 230 people were drowned, while millions more lost their homes and their livelihoods.

This years’s floods have also killed 167 people in Cambodia, and another 40 in Vietnam and Laos.

Pakistan flooded again

Just as they did around this time last year, devastating floods, caused by heavy monsoon rain, have once again struck the unhappy country of Pakistan.    So far this year nearly 250 people have been killed and more than 600,000 homes have been destroyed.    Last year, up to 2,000 people lost their lives.

The United Nations has launched an appeal for more than £230 million to help the estimated six million who have been affected this year.    Once again, the Pakistan government has been criticised for what has been seen an ineffectual response.

More than two million people are said to be suffering from flood-related illnesses, while at least 7,000 have been bitten by snakes.    Local people claim that if proper drainage systems had been in place, many lives could have been saved.

(See also my blogs of July 20, Aug 11, 17 and 23, 2010, and 27 Jan, 2011.)

Sri Lanka - another forgotten flood

One month ago today (Jan 6, 2011), I blogged about the Philippines floods, which had been forgotten as the world watched what was happening in Australia. The world also seems to have overlooked the current monsoon floods in Sri Lanka.

At least 14 people have been killed, and more than a million have had their homes flooded. A quarter of a million are now living in shelters provided by the government. Roads and fields are under water across the east, centre and north of the island.

Those areas were also hit by floods caused by heavy rain last month, when 43 people were killed. The United Nations appealed for 51 million dollars in emergency aid to help the victims.

Perhaps the deadliest monsoon flood of all time was the one that struck India in September 1978, and was made even more disastrous by a cyclone the following month. An estimated 15,000 people were killed.

Pakistan still flooding

Pakistan’s monsoon flood ordeal is far from over. Hundreds of thousands more people have had to flee their homes after fresh flooding in the southern Sindh province, which has had 19 of its 23 districts inundated.

Aid agencies say that at least 8 million people have been driven from their homes, and 1,600 have died. More than 45 major bridges and thousands of miles of roads have been destroyed or badly damaged.

Agriculture has also been severely hit. The Minister for Food says about a fifth of Pakistan’s crop growing areas have been flooded. More than a million farm animals have been drowned, farm equipment and irrigation infrastructure has been damaged, and there are worries that fields will be too waterlogged for farmers to sow winter wheat.

The total damage suffered by the country is put at up to £26bn. With Russian wheat production also badly hit by a drought, there’s growing concern about world food supplies.

* My book London’s Disasters has been reviewed by the Londonist website. http://londonist.com/2010/09/book_review_london_disasters_by_joh.php

Pakistan - normal terrorism resumed

The monsoon floods have disrupted many things in Pakistan, but not, it seems, religious terrorism. A suicide bomb has just killed at least 50 people at a Shia Muslim rally in Quetta in the south-west of the country. Sunni Taliban militants say they carried out the attack.

It came just two days after another suicide bombing operation directed at a Shia procession in Lahore, which killed 31 people. Again the Taliban said they were responsible, and that the attack was in retaliation for the killing of a Sunni leader last year.

In Pakistan, Sunni Muslims outnumber Shias by about four to one. A Shia leader has appealed for calm.

This is the same murderous sectarian feud that has claimed so many lives in Iraq. One of the worst outrages there came on November 23, 2006 when a series of bombs went off during a Shia religious festival in Sadr City, killing at least 215 people. Shias retaliated with a series of attacks on Sunni targets.

(See also my blogs of March 28 and Oct 28, 2009 and Jan 3 and Feb 6 , 2010.)

Rain and cholera

More trouble being caused by heavy rains. Now they’re being blamed for a cholera outbreak that has hit a third of Nigeria’s 36 provinces. Doctors say the whole country is now threatened. So far, there have been more than 6,000 cases and more than 350 people have died.

The outbreak has also killed 200 people in neighbouring Cameroon, and in Pakistan doctors are also seeing cases in the wake of the monsoon floods. In the 19^th Century, cholera was driven out of most of the industrialised world by improved hygiene, living conditions and public health measures.

The disease may have struck India as early as the 4^th century BC, but the first pandemic is reckoned to have begun in 1817 at Jessore and then spread through the rest of India before attacking much of Asia as well as Russia and East Africa.

The UK was struck for the first time during the second pandemic, which started in Russia. It reached every corner of Britain and killed an estimated 60,000 people. Hungary and Russia lost perhaps 200,000 each. It managed to cross the Atlantic, causing many deaths in Canada, the USA, Mexico and Cuba. (See also my blogs of Jan 31 and July 20.)

Pakistan floods - an ungenerous response?

Three weeks after the monsoon floods were unleashed on Pakistan, Louis-Georges Arsenault, director of emergency services for UN agency UNICEF, has blasted the international response as “extraordinarily” inadequate.

M Arsenault says this is the biggest humanitarian crisis “in decades.” The UN had called for around £300m in emergency aid, and says it has raised nearly 70% of this, but the Pakistan government says the cost of rebuilding could be as high as £10bn, and up to 17m people have been hit by the floods.

So if the response has been rather lukewarm, what are the reasons? One offered is that the death toll has been relatively small - “only” about 1,600 compared with around ¼ million in the Haiti earthquake and the Boxing Day tsunami, and that the flood has been a more slowly developing and less dramatic disaster

Then there are said to be worries about corruption, a feeling that oil-rich Muslim countries have failed to do enough, the perception that Pakistan has been an exporter of terrorism, and the global financial crisis. Against that, the people of the UK have stumped up £30m out of their own pockets, and India, which has often believed itself a victim of Pakistani-inspired terrorism, has provided around £3m.

Russian droughts and Pakistani floods - the connection

I have already blogged about the Pakistan monsoon floods (Aug 11) which have killed at least 2,000 and driven perhaps 20 million from their homes, and Russia’s worst known heatwave (July 15) which has killed more than 50 people in wildfires, and has doubled the death rate in Moscow through soaring temperatures and acid smog.

So what is the connection? Air movements called Rossby waves are supposed to move through the upper atmosphere, but sometimes they get stuck. That has apparently happened this year, and when they do they trap the weather beneath them.

This has brought persistent high pressure over Russia, and troughs over Pakistan . Once you get this gridlock, the weather tends to be self-reinforcing. So as Russia warms up, the ground gets hotter and drier. Grass, brush and forest starts to catch fire, and the soot that’s produced heats the air even more.

Disturbingly, some scientists say that they are exactly the kind of trends you would expect to see with global warming, and that they will get worse. There’s more detail in an interesting article in the British magazine The Economist. http://www.economist.com/

Monsoon floods

The death toll in the Pakistan monsoon floods is now put at about 1,600. With perhaps 14 million people driven from their homes, and crops and animals being wiped out, it is rightly being seen as a major catastrophe.

However, this is not yet the deadliest monsoon flood in history. There have been at least ten over the last 40 years that have claimed more lives. The worst hit countries have been India and Bangladesh.

A monsoon flood in Bangladesh in 1974 is said to have killed nearly 29,000, though some of these may have perished in the famine that followed. It happened just two years after the country had won independence and less than four years after the deadliest cyclone in history had killed perhaps half a million of its people.

*The Croydon Guardian has written a piece on London’s Disasters. http://www.croydonguardian.co.uk/news/8313593.Author_masters_London_s_disasters/

Monsoon floods

Monsoon floods have killed at least 36 people in the Indian state of Orissa, while over the border in Pakistan, at least 26 have been killed in Karachi – mainly from collapsing walls or being electrocuted.

The city’s ageing drainage system means that every year the monsoon tends to cause havoc. In August 2006, 35 people died as a result of the rains, while in India in 2005, hundreds were killed in the area around Mumbai, as a record 26 inches fell in one day.

Perhaps the deadliest monsoon flood of all time struck India in September 1978. The Ganges and Yamuna rivers burst their banks, flooding hundreds of towns and villages, and cholera broke out as drinking water was contaminated.

In the first week of October, the flooding was made worse by a cyclone. Altogether, 15,000 people are estimated to have died, and no fewer than 43 million had to flee their homes.