Apparently some tourists were rescued by helicopter when there was flash flooding in the Samburu area. The British Army and Airforce helicopters just happened to be in the area because they 'train' there. It's lucky they were able to rescue the people in the tourist areas. None of the tourists were reported as having any injuries. An elephant research centre was not so lucky. The BBC article doesn't mention if there were any non-Britons or non-tourists involved.
In other areas, six people are reported to have been drowned and five others are missing. The AllAfrica.com article doesn't say if there happened to be any British helicopters there. Livestock, homes and properties have been destroyed in many areas, including Samburu. Many people have been displaced. Interestingly, Kenyan helicopters were also involved in the airlifting of tourists in Samburu. Perhaps it's easier to spot white faces against the muddy background.
One of the deaths was in Mogotio, where flooding a couple of months ago displaced several hundred, many of whom are still living in tents. Another person died and one is missing just outside Nakuru town, in Kaptembwa. Three people were killed by flooding further North. While many have already been displaced in Western province, many more are threatened with flooding as rivers are close to bursting their banks. Exact figures are unclear but the number is said to be 'below 2000'. But thankfully the 600 tourists (although this number includes tourist lodge staff) said to be affected are all OK, having lost only their luggage.
Many areas are being warned to prepare for more flooding and other hazards that come with the very wet conditions, such as cholera, malaria and other water related diseases. Farmers have been holding off sowing crops in many areas because the rain has been too heavy and those who have planted are in danger of losing their crops. Maize seeds are being distributed in some areas, although this is unlikely to benefit many people for some time. Let's hope those British helicopters and emergency services will still be available if and when disaster strikes.
Showing posts with label disaster. Show all posts
Showing posts with label disaster. Show all posts
Monday, March 8, 2010
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Tomorrow's Disasters Are Preventable Today
I think most people, if they saw their child playing near a fire or in some other dangerous situation, would do something about it before an accident occurred. They wouldn't just watch and then shell out the money for hospital fees once an accident had occurred. But donor money is usually spent on clearing up after a disaster has hit.
Many children (and quite a number of adults) in developing countries are severely burned because most cooking is done on open fires, close to the ground. Donor money is sometimes forthcoming for the expensive surgery and skin grafts required by people who have suffered burns. But it's not often you come across substantial projects to provide people with alternatives to cooking on open fires, using mainly wood or charcoal.
Burning wood and charcoal accounts for a very large proportion of the carbon emissions from developing countries. Forests are fast disappearing and wood is getting more expensive and less viable as a fuel source. The use of wood and charcoal is part of a massive environemntal disaster. There are cheaper alternatives, such as solar cooking, biogas and the use of fuel briquettes made from combustible materials.
There is a lot to be gained from not burning wood and charcoal. There are the environmental benefits and safety benefits to consider. Also, people in close proximity to wood and charcoal cookers suffer from respiratory problems, one of the top killers in developing countries. Alternative fuels are cheaper, even free. And their use can reduce the time and effort taken to collect wood and produce charcoal.
But rather than see aid money go into proejcts that have these multiple advantages, we continue to direct it to big disasters. The children that suffer terrible burns, that we wish to see treated, shouldn't have to suffer these burns in the first place. The plastic and reconstructive surgeons should be concentrating on people who are not suffering from preventable injuries.
Similarly, money for surgeons and health resources is spent on reconstructing the faces of children affected by noma, which affects children suffering from malnutrition. Food security and proper nutrition would prevent many other illnesses and health conditions, in addition to noma, and would also reduce deaths, especially among infants and young people. Those who don't die from illnesses arising from insufficient food and nutrition still suffer stunted growth and retarded mental development. These are all avoidable.
The current debate about land grabbing in developing countries, where greedy multinationals are buying up huge tracts of land to grow food for rich countries, is an idle exercise if it does not go any way towards reducing this phenomenon substantially. By the time this land has been ravaged by industrial scale farming and contaminated by genetically modified organisms, it will be too late. What is the point knowing now what the consequences will be if we are not going to do anything about it?
Much of the land being grabbed is destined for biofuel production. The ridiculousness of starving people producing crops to fuel the cars of well fed people, far away, seems to be lost on us. We, the people benefitting from the increasing impoverishment of the poor, may be willing to see our governments giving large sums of aid money to starving people in the future, but we don't seem to want to do anything to prevent the circumstances that will eventually leave people starving.
Land grabbing, especially for biofuel production, results in food, water and other vital resources being exported from poor countries to rich countries. If we prevent the land grabbing now, we won't have to send aid money later to the disaster we are so busy creating.
Many children (and quite a number of adults) in developing countries are severely burned because most cooking is done on open fires, close to the ground. Donor money is sometimes forthcoming for the expensive surgery and skin grafts required by people who have suffered burns. But it's not often you come across substantial projects to provide people with alternatives to cooking on open fires, using mainly wood or charcoal.
Burning wood and charcoal accounts for a very large proportion of the carbon emissions from developing countries. Forests are fast disappearing and wood is getting more expensive and less viable as a fuel source. The use of wood and charcoal is part of a massive environemntal disaster. There are cheaper alternatives, such as solar cooking, biogas and the use of fuel briquettes made from combustible materials.
There is a lot to be gained from not burning wood and charcoal. There are the environmental benefits and safety benefits to consider. Also, people in close proximity to wood and charcoal cookers suffer from respiratory problems, one of the top killers in developing countries. Alternative fuels are cheaper, even free. And their use can reduce the time and effort taken to collect wood and produce charcoal.
But rather than see aid money go into proejcts that have these multiple advantages, we continue to direct it to big disasters. The children that suffer terrible burns, that we wish to see treated, shouldn't have to suffer these burns in the first place. The plastic and reconstructive surgeons should be concentrating on people who are not suffering from preventable injuries.
Similarly, money for surgeons and health resources is spent on reconstructing the faces of children affected by noma, which affects children suffering from malnutrition. Food security and proper nutrition would prevent many other illnesses and health conditions, in addition to noma, and would also reduce deaths, especially among infants and young people. Those who don't die from illnesses arising from insufficient food and nutrition still suffer stunted growth and retarded mental development. These are all avoidable.
The current debate about land grabbing in developing countries, where greedy multinationals are buying up huge tracts of land to grow food for rich countries, is an idle exercise if it does not go any way towards reducing this phenomenon substantially. By the time this land has been ravaged by industrial scale farming and contaminated by genetically modified organisms, it will be too late. What is the point knowing now what the consequences will be if we are not going to do anything about it?
Much of the land being grabbed is destined for biofuel production. The ridiculousness of starving people producing crops to fuel the cars of well fed people, far away, seems to be lost on us. We, the people benefitting from the increasing impoverishment of the poor, may be willing to see our governments giving large sums of aid money to starving people in the future, but we don't seem to want to do anything to prevent the circumstances that will eventually leave people starving.
Land grabbing, especially for biofuel production, results in food, water and other vital resources being exported from poor countries to rich countries. If we prevent the land grabbing now, we won't have to send aid money later to the disaster we are so busy creating.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Disaster and Vulnerability
Tomorrow evening, if all goes well, I'll get a bus from Nairobi to Mwanza, arriving there some time the next morning. I'm very sad to leave Kenya and even Nairobi, although the city can be trying at times. The last three months have flown by but I have heard and seen many things, good and bad.
On the positive side, there are the people working to improve the lives of those around them, people working in organisations, often small and under funded organisations, also some people working on their own. There are so many ideas and initiatives and some people have the motivation to put them into effect and the determination to keep at it. And this despite the fact that much needed support can be a long time coming.
On the negative side, I have heard of politicians, police and others in positions of power abusing their positions. The results are all around us, millions starving, millions with curable diseases, millions more facing starvation and disease; and a handful of very rich people in big cars who appear on TV every evening to promise to make everything better and to blame something or someone else, lest anyone think they may have been responsible.
A recent haunting image on TV was that of a child scraping the remains of ugali off a big pot and eating it. There is a shortage of food in some areas, partly blamed on the post election violence, climate irregularities and various other things. But it has been known for a long time that famine is not just due to a shortage of food. Some of the food imported to alleviate the shortage just disappeared; some farmers are holding on to their stocks because the shortage of food may well continue, etc. This has all been building up and, like all disasters, it has multiple causes.
But one of the most awful things I have seen, perhaps in my whole life, is the film of the Molo fire, taken by someone on their mobile phone. In fact, it was less a matter of what you could see in the film and more a matter of what you could hear: people screaming and shouting, close by and far away. There were harrowing accounts in newspapers of the things people did to alleviate their suffering. I was so moved by them that the sight of a dead body (killed in a road traffic accident, yesterday) lying on the side of the road had little impact. It only made me think of the blackened bundles that marked the place where some people burned beyond recognition near Molo.
Incidentally, Molo is one of the places that suffered very badly during the post election violence of last year. If you drive through Molo Junction, you will see many charred remains of houses and premises and blackened squares and rectangles that were once buildings. There are still rows of tents nearby to house some of the many people displaced in the violence. But areas scarred by multiple problems are not rare, they are the norm. They are the areas where the most vulnerable people live.
One politician, George Saitoti, Minister for Internal Security, said publicly that the people who got burned had learned a lesson. Lucy Kibaki, the wife of the president, asked how people could have learned a lesson if they are dead. But another question is, who most needed to learn a lesson? The government is aware of the problems with the country's roads and emergency services, in particular. This is not the first disaster caused by such neglect, nor is it the first time that the ability to react to disaster was hampered for the same reasons.
The remark reminds me of a woman interviewed a few months ago because she had written a book about HIV with a provocative title, The Wisdom of Whores. She concluded that there are serious HIV epidemics in some countries because some people do stupid things. But she's wrong; people in all countries do inadvisable and risky things.
It's risky to have unprotected sex with someone you don't know, even with someone you do know. And it's risky to siphon petrol from a crashed tanker. But many people know they are taking risks, so it's pointless to tell them, especially if you don't offer them an alternative. If you need money, you will consider even the riskiest ways of getting it and the same may go for any other opportunity that arises.
In Kenya there currently crises (and scandals) relating to food, water, fuel, energy, health and many other things. But none of them are new. There have been warnings about all these issues for decades. Fires like the ones in Nakumatt and Molo and the lack of resilience that followed them can be traced to cutbacks at least as long ago as the 1980s, before many of the people who died were even born. The country’s health problems relate to similar cutbacks.
In contrast, all the politicians and many other powerful people around today were also around in the 1980s. It is they who should have learned lessons. Perhaps they, including George Saitoti, didn't learn lessons because they are not the ones who have suffered any of the painful consequences?
Saitoti shouldn’t be sacked because he could have prevented those two terrible incidents of last week but because he and his colleagues have spent several decades refusing to put in place the conditions under which accidents like that do not happen. He and his colleagues have failed to improve access to health, education, infrastructure and other social benefits and thus created a population of highly vulnerable people.
On the positive side, there are the people working to improve the lives of those around them, people working in organisations, often small and under funded organisations, also some people working on their own. There are so many ideas and initiatives and some people have the motivation to put them into effect and the determination to keep at it. And this despite the fact that much needed support can be a long time coming.
On the negative side, I have heard of politicians, police and others in positions of power abusing their positions. The results are all around us, millions starving, millions with curable diseases, millions more facing starvation and disease; and a handful of very rich people in big cars who appear on TV every evening to promise to make everything better and to blame something or someone else, lest anyone think they may have been responsible.
A recent haunting image on TV was that of a child scraping the remains of ugali off a big pot and eating it. There is a shortage of food in some areas, partly blamed on the post election violence, climate irregularities and various other things. But it has been known for a long time that famine is not just due to a shortage of food. Some of the food imported to alleviate the shortage just disappeared; some farmers are holding on to their stocks because the shortage of food may well continue, etc. This has all been building up and, like all disasters, it has multiple causes.
But one of the most awful things I have seen, perhaps in my whole life, is the film of the Molo fire, taken by someone on their mobile phone. In fact, it was less a matter of what you could see in the film and more a matter of what you could hear: people screaming and shouting, close by and far away. There were harrowing accounts in newspapers of the things people did to alleviate their suffering. I was so moved by them that the sight of a dead body (killed in a road traffic accident, yesterday) lying on the side of the road had little impact. It only made me think of the blackened bundles that marked the place where some people burned beyond recognition near Molo.
Incidentally, Molo is one of the places that suffered very badly during the post election violence of last year. If you drive through Molo Junction, you will see many charred remains of houses and premises and blackened squares and rectangles that were once buildings. There are still rows of tents nearby to house some of the many people displaced in the violence. But areas scarred by multiple problems are not rare, they are the norm. They are the areas where the most vulnerable people live.
One politician, George Saitoti, Minister for Internal Security, said publicly that the people who got burned had learned a lesson. Lucy Kibaki, the wife of the president, asked how people could have learned a lesson if they are dead. But another question is, who most needed to learn a lesson? The government is aware of the problems with the country's roads and emergency services, in particular. This is not the first disaster caused by such neglect, nor is it the first time that the ability to react to disaster was hampered for the same reasons.
The remark reminds me of a woman interviewed a few months ago because she had written a book about HIV with a provocative title, The Wisdom of Whores. She concluded that there are serious HIV epidemics in some countries because some people do stupid things. But she's wrong; people in all countries do inadvisable and risky things.
It's risky to have unprotected sex with someone you don't know, even with someone you do know. And it's risky to siphon petrol from a crashed tanker. But many people know they are taking risks, so it's pointless to tell them, especially if you don't offer them an alternative. If you need money, you will consider even the riskiest ways of getting it and the same may go for any other opportunity that arises.
In Kenya there currently crises (and scandals) relating to food, water, fuel, energy, health and many other things. But none of them are new. There have been warnings about all these issues for decades. Fires like the ones in Nakumatt and Molo and the lack of resilience that followed them can be traced to cutbacks at least as long ago as the 1980s, before many of the people who died were even born. The country’s health problems relate to similar cutbacks.
In contrast, all the politicians and many other powerful people around today were also around in the 1980s. It is they who should have learned lessons. Perhaps they, including George Saitoti, didn't learn lessons because they are not the ones who have suffered any of the painful consequences?
Saitoti shouldn’t be sacked because he could have prevented those two terrible incidents of last week but because he and his colleagues have spent several decades refusing to put in place the conditions under which accidents like that do not happen. He and his colleagues have failed to improve access to health, education, infrastructure and other social benefits and thus created a population of highly vulnerable people.
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