A quiet cyclone

I’ve watched the developing news about the Burma cyclone and tidal surge with increasing trepidation over the last few days.

Inevitably enough, my mind is taken back 18 years almost to the day,to 29 April 1991, and the Bangladesh cyclone.  I happened to be living in Chittagong at the time, working for Irish Aid agency Concern Worldwide, so was pretty involved with emegency relief activities in the months that followed, both in the slums of Chittagong where I was working and subsequently on the hardest hit outlying Islands like Kutub Dia, where I stuck lots of saline drips in people to keep them alive through the cholera-like epidemic that followed (one unexpected positive consequence of the first Gulf War was that a US Navy ship, en route from the Gulf to Okinawha for R&R, diverted to the Bangladesh coastline and gave us lots and lots of equipment we would never otherwise have had).

I read up on the press coverage of the cyclone later, and the estimates of lives loss has a sad resonance with the developing coverage of this latest cyclone.  First reports were of a hundred dead, a day or two later it was 3,000, then it became 10,000.  In the end the death toll was officially 138, 000, but many Bangladeshis will tell you it was probably a quarter of a million. 

I’m afraid estimates of the Burma loss of life are likely to rise exponentially over the next few days.  Bangladesh had another huge cyclone in November 2007, which ‘only’ killed 10,000, but this was because the emergency response machinery, both physical in terms of shelters, and most impressively in terms of the early warning and evacuation procedure, has moved on massively since 1991 (though still not enough).  I don’t know much about Burma, except that it’s bang next door in the Bay of Bengal, but I’m pretty sure the government there has not been building shelters and developing evacuation responses.

 There’s nothing much I can do from here other than feel bad, on the basis of some small understanding of the untold misery in Burma tonight, and give some money.  Feeling angry that it takes three days to get anywhere near the media headlines doesn’t do much good – of course I understand that (currently) 10,000 people dead in the water is not much of a story if it doesn’t involve Brits, or at least white people, and I know the story will fade quickly enough.  It’s a crap world at times.

 If you want to give money, and I hope you will, look out for the Disasters Emergency Committee appeal which I hope will come soon (though even their website doesn’t cover it tonight, strangely).  See  http://www.dec.org.uk/.   Yes, it will be a drop in the ocean, and there’ll be another natural disaster along in a while that could have been mitigated in a fairer world, but if in the meantime your cash saves one life, or goes towards partially rebuidling another, it’s worth it.