Forewarned, not forearmed

The Myanmar government says most residents were warned about approaching cyclone Nargis, but many failed to take appropriate measures or were simply caught off-guard.
 
“Most of the people [in the worst-hit areas] got the cyclone warning from us two or three days before,” claimed Tun Lwin, director-general of the Department of Meteorology and Hydrology (DMH), in Yangon, the former Burmese capital.
 
“The problem was that they weren’t fully aware of it and had no knowledge as to how to prepare for it [the cyclone],” he said.   

Lack of preparedness
 
Scores of cyclone survivors across southern Myanmar lack adequate disaster awareness in the wake of Nargis – the country’s worst natural disaster in living memory, which left almost 140,000 people dead or missing and affected another 2.4 million.  
 
“The true tragedy of this event is that it is not unique. Asia has shown time and again its vulnerability to severe cyclones,” said Oliver Fall of the Bangkok-based Asian Disaster Preparedness Center [see: www.adpc.net] , which has been mandated by several southeast Asian nations to establish an tsunami and multi-hazard early warning system (EWS) and has been working closely with the DMH.

Though many residents were warned of the storm’s arrival by television or radio, many perished out of ignorance of what to do or where to go, despite Myanmar’s history of natural disasters.
 
Over the past 60 years, Myanmar has seen 11 severe tropical cyclones, two of which made landfall in the Ayeyarwady Delta. The region was also affected by the 2004 tsunami that claimed more than 60 lives and left 2,500 homeless along the coast.  
 
Yet little has done to raise awareness. “People should be educated about [natural] disasters and how to prepare,” Tun Lwin repeated.   
 
Although the country does have an EWS, as in many countries in the region, it lacks financial resources to invest in it.  
 
Moreover, many donors remain reluctant to provide support for the military-led government.

Photo: Lynn Maung/IRIN

Houses like these in the delta are highly vulnerable to storms and other natural disasters

Capacity building
 
Fall maintains that the main issue in combating a lack of capacity in government systems, as well as at the community level, is partly access, but also the adequate time to conduct capacity-building exercises.  
 
“It has only been three years since the tsunami and Myanmar’s membership of the EWS; there is no feasible way that sufficient capacities can be built up within that timeframe on a national level in Myanmar,” the ADPC official said.  
 
To promote disaster awareness, programmes should be initiated in the cyclone-hit villages through community-based mechanisms, while disaster-resistant buildings should be built in areas most at risk.
 
“We’re focusing on community-level preparedness and response planning through the current early recovery programmes and it will be scaled up gradually to other parts of the country,” Dillip Kumar Bhanja, disaster risk reduction specialist for the UN Development Programme in Myanmar, confirmed.
 
As part of that effort, UNDP is promoting disaster-resistant buildings through the training of masons.
 
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