THE GUARDIAN

 

LEADER

 
Learning from disaster


Wednesday December 29, 2004

It is hard to take in the scale of the human tragedy wrought by the Indian Ocean tsunami, its death toll nearly 60,000 and rising yesterday as the world gazed in open-mouthed horror at images of devastation and bereavement. The catastrophe has affected 10 countries from the Indonesian island of Sumatra through Sri Lanka to distant Somalia, but the combination of a globalised world, mass tourism, easy communications and the Christmas holiday season means that its impact is being watched and experienced in distant continents. Exotic islands and palm-fringed beaches have become scenes of hell, a Hollywood disaster movie come to horrifying life - with the dazed and lucky survivors limping home through the arrival lounge at Heathrow and elsewhere in Europe.

Too many of the victims are still unidentified and unburied, but it is already clear that a tsunami early warning system, like the one that has existed for almost 40 years in the Pacific, where seabed earthquakes are more common, could have helped save thousands of lives, except perhaps in the areas closest to the epicentre. It is true that for all the advances in seismology, earthquakes are still notoriously difficult to predict, but a tsunami, which occurs after an earthquake, is entirely predictable. As our science correspondent described the scene on Boxing Day: "Data was piling up in monitoring stations across the world even as the titanic surge of water was still hundreds of miles from its destructive landfall." Sri Lanka, with the highest national death toll, was hit two and a half hours after the earthquake. It beggars belief that the government in Thailand, which had up to an hour to issue a warning, failed to do so - partly for fear of the effect on the country's lucrative tourism industry, which of course is now in ruins. In a world with a cornucopia of fast and reliable communications systems, a coordinated alert allowing flight and evacuation should be easily possible. This is about familiarisation, and resources, with casualties the highest in the poorest areas. Lessons must be learned and quickly applied. The UN World Conference on Disaster Reduction in Japan in mid-January could not be more timely.

More immediately, the priority must be carefully targeted emergency help. Aid agencies are right to avoid rushing in until they can be confident that their resources will be put to the most effective use. Fresh water, food and shelter will be the most urgent needs, along with the disposal of corpses. But efforts will be required too to combat waterborne diseases such as malaria and diarrhoea, made doubly difficult by the destruction of hospitals and clinics. It is a time for coordination, not turf wars, and right that the UN, with its experienced specialised agencies, should take the lead.

And that is the easy bit. It will take many months before there can be anything like a return to normality in these grieving coastal regions. Long after that a huge and sustained effort will be required to rebuild shattered infrastructure. It is exactly a year ago that a huge earthquake destroyed much of the ancient Iranian city of Bam, but only a small fraction of the $1bn of aid pledged has reached it. Amid talk of convening donor conferences, promises of financial help to the Indian Ocean littoral already look terrifyingly small compared to the scale of what is being called the most expensive natural disaster ever - one estimate is $13bn. The range and destructiveness of the tsunami, its extraordinary global resonance and the common humanity that binds us - wealthy western tourists and poor Sri Lankan fishermen alike - requires that this time the world does what decency requires be done.