Hurricane Sandy, the biggest Atlantic hurricane in history, made landfall in the East Coast of the United States late on October 29, and has so far been responsible for at least 33 deaths in mainland US. Eight million Americans were left shivering from cold as power lines failed. Inclement weather caused the shutdown of New York Stock Exchange for two successive days, the first time it has happened since 1888. Major hospitals, airports and transport hubs were inoperative. Estimates of total economic damage from Sandy run as high as US $25 billion. The great damages wrought by Sandy on New York City and the adjoining urban hubs is a sobering reminder of how nature can overwhelm even the best disaster preparedness programs, even when warnings are issued weeks in advance.
As the residents of one of the most natural disaster-prone countries in the world, Nepalis have been following recent events in the US with a degree of trepidation. Each monsoon Nepal is beset by a spate of floods and landslides, resulting in the loss of hundreds of lives. During windy summer months, forest fires cause heavy loss of property and natural resources. But among all likely natural disasters, earthquakes undoubtedly represent the single biggest danger for the country. Last year, GeoHazards International, a US-based non-profit working to mitigate earthquake risk worldwide, put Kathmandu atop the list of 21 most vulnerable cities to earthquake 6.0 or higher in magnitude. The government is not unaware of these grave risks. Earlier this year, Deputy PM and Home Minister Bijaya Kumar Gachchhadar pledged at least two percent of national budget for establishment of effective disaster risk reduction mechanisms in the country. The country, he said, desperately needs better preventive and coping mechanisms from natural disasters. We agree.
If only wishes were horses. Even though successive governments have paid lip service to disaster risk mitigation, very little has been done on the ground. This is because despite the big pledges, disaster risk reduction is very low in government priority list. Perhaps the best example of this is the failure to approve the Disaster Risk Reeducation Act, which has long been stuck in the parliament. The most important facet of this act is its emphasis on preemptive measures to minimize damages from future disasters. Currently the country operates under the Natural Calamity Relief Act, whose main focus is post-disaster rescue and relief. There is no doubt that our relief and rescue efforts need to be fine tuned with the changing times, but surely not before we devise effective preventive measures which could potentially save thousands of lives and a colossal amount of property.
The single most effective measure for disaster risk mitigation in the country will be retrofitting houses to make them quake resistant. As of now, only a tiny fraction of houses in major urban settlements are retrofitted. So far we don’t even have our basics right when it comes to disaster preparedness. The potentially huge loss of life and property if a disaster of Sandy’s scale visits Nepal is hard to imagine. What we can be sure of, and which we note with a degree of sadness and foreboding, is that the egregiously underprepared country is likely to fare a lot worse than today’s hurricane-ravaged America.
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