It
has been two weeks since the day that Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines. When
I first wrote about it last week, the death total, while still heartbreaking,
was at 2,275 people lost. Now, it seems that number has climbed to 5,235. CNN
reports that 23,501 people have been injured by the storm and 1,613 are still
missing. USA Today wrote that “a stench coming from piles of debris of what
once were homes indicates that bodies remain trapped underneath despite the
ongoing effort to bury victims”. Firemen are still collecting the bodies of the
victims, and relief organizations are still bringing in supplies and providing
aid, doing their best to help the survivors.
But
most are still struggling, and don’t have consistent access to safe, clean
water or to food or shelter. Workers and survivors across the country are
working to clear the rubble and debris, and collect any usable material that
they can find. Reconstruction and rebuilding have begun, but it will be a slow
process.
In
fact, the action plan the government in Philippine capital city of Manila is
predicted to include three to five years of reconstruction and rehabilitation,
and that’s just in the hardest hit areas.
But
governments within the whole of the Philippines don’t just want to recover from
Typhoon Haiyan, they want to learn from it, because despite having about 20
tropical storms a year, the Philippines were still ill-prepared for this storm.
People
want houses and other buildings to be constructed to be able to withstand such
storms, and to put into place legal standards so that buildings in the future
are constructed in a more safe and resilient way. During the storm, even
evacuation shelters collapsed, so those need to be rebuilt to a better standard
as well. But that won’t be enough either. They need to prevent any structures
from being built too close to the shoreline in order to minimize the death and
injury totals, and this will also give people a bit more time to react and
respond to a disaster if they are not in the immediately affected areas (as in
the shoreline). The city council in a Philippine city called Tanauan actually passed
a resolution “making a non-build zone from the shoreline to 150 feet inland”.
They also plan to “move15,000 of the town’s 40,000 residents to new areas”.
This means that many of the residents live in unsafe areas, or areas that are
most likely to be the most affected in future storms, so that they may decrease
the death and injury tolls in this way also.
Another
problem is education. For example, people were warned about the potential for a
“storm-surge” after the initial storm. A storm surge is when the water level
near the shore rises and comes onto shore. In the case of this storm, this wall
of water came crashing down and destroyed the Philippine city Talcoban, and is
responsible for much of the deaths occurring there. People don’t think of
storm-surge as the dangerous hazard that they should, and should actually be
thinking about it just like they would with a tsunami.
One
of the biggest challenges and lessons that need to be learned from Typhoon
Haiyan was the general outlooks and attitudes people in the Philippines had
towards storms. As USA Today put it, they are often “stubbornly lax”. For
example, many people refused to evacuate in the first place, before the storm
hit. Even afterwards, people refuse to leave the areas of their destroyed
homes, and fully intend to rebuild there, even if that area would be highly
vulnerable to future storms.
Overall,
the Philippines is still in great need of aid, and I hope that they can
overcome such a tragedy and all its consequences. Most of all, I hope that we
are all able to learn from this event and better prepare ourselves for all hazards
so they don’t become disasters.
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