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Ready or not, Bangladesh awaits disaster

KUTUBDIA ISLAND, Bangladesh - The tsunami spared them, but here on south Asia's coast of calamities, where the sea kills with regularity and abandon, they know their turn will come again.

"God knows what will happen to us next time," said Nur Hussein.

The 45-year-old peasant stood beneath a sturdy rain tree he climbed and clung to last time, when a super cyclone drove 25-foot-deep waters surging across flat little Kutubdia, sweeping 19 of his family to their deaths along with 10,000 other islanders, in what was just one scene in a vast national tragedy.

Fourteen years have passed and Bangladesh is now better prepared for the Bay of Bengal's killer storms, with hundreds of concrete shelters and thousands of volunteers to warn and help the population at a cyclone's approach.

But Hussein, like millions of other Bangladeshis, has no shelter near his hut. Sea walls promised long ago exist only on paper. Weathermen in the distant capital work with outdated forecasting tools. And too many of those volunteers lack batteries for their megaphones and bicycles for their urgent rounds.

In the aftermath of the tsunami that devastated coastlines in nearby nations, Bangladesh stands as an example of how one impoverished land, with foreign help, has recovered from past catastrophes and prepared for future ones - and of how it has not.

The regional head of the national Cyclone Preparedness Program is candid about its shortcomings.

"If it happened today, all the people would know a super cyclone was coming, but due to the shortage of cyclone shelters, many people would still be killed," Golam Rabbani said at his radio-equipped command center in Chittagong, a port city 30 miles north of here.

That still would be an improvement over 1991, when the nearby mainland district of Banshkhali got no warning, and 40,000 people there died.

"In '91, you can say we were at the stage you now see in Sri Lanka and the Maldives with the tsunami," said Mohammad Nojibur Rahman, a government disaster-prevention expert.

Bangladesh then moved into the next stage a year later, creating a ministry for disaster management, now led by Chowdhury Kamal Ibne Yusuf. Foreign donors and Bangladeshi agencies began building shelters, hundreds of two- or three-story concrete boxes on pillars, each able to hold between a few hundred and 3,000 people. Because of the flat and overpopulated terrain, poor roads and relatively short notice, people have nowhere else to flee.

More than 2,000 shelters now dot this coast of marsh and paddy. Kutubdia has 92 shelters, including one, financed by the European Union, near the spot where 250 islanders saved themselves by jamming onto a small mosque's rooftop in 1991.

But Bangladesh is a crowded land - 141-million people in a place the size of Iowa - and officials acknowledge that at least 3,000 more shelters are needed.

Yusuf said there would be many fewer casualties today if a storm like 1991's struck, but still "there's a huge need for more shelters" - with no money and no plans for them.

Even the international Red Cross federation, which built 149, has ceased financing shelters, which can cost up to $100,000 each because of remote locations, the need for strong foundations and pillars, and high transport costs for heavy building materials.

"It's funding," said Mohammad Nasir Ullah, national director of the Cyclone Preparedness Program, a partnership of his Bangladesh Red Crescent Society and the government. "Needs came up in other countries for federation funding."

The havoc of the tsunami has spurred some action. Seeing its neighbors devastated, Bangladesh's government said in January it would accelerate a program to build all new schools as shelters. But that would take many years.

"The government doesn't have the capacity to build schools to meet the need for shelters," said Monzu Morshed of CARE Bangladesh, whose aid organization has inventoried the cyclone shelters and found extensive problems of upkeep and design. One in eight were found to be unusable.

Though short in numbers, the shelters are still more advanced than other ideas for warding off new calamities.

After the 1991 cyclone, officials said they would ring Kutubdia with a 26-foot-high embankment within two years. But today barely one-tenth of the island's 30-mile circumference has new embankments, and none is more than 10 feet high. "Even with very high tides and wind, the water comes over," Khan said.

The government in the 1990s began planting a "green belt" of trees along the Bangladesh coast, to break waves and wind. But today Kutubdia has only a couple of lonely stands of feathery tamarisks taking root.

After 1991, the government did give Kutubdia its first "roads" - raised pathways of brick just wide enough for the few motor vehicles on the island, where pedal-rickshaws are the main transport.

Because of declining foreign funding, the national program has fallen years behind in training newcomers among its 33,000 volunteers, and fewer than half are fully equipped, Red Crescent officials said.

In Dhaka the Bangladesh Meteorological Department and its antiquated computers face their own challenges.

The meteorologists rely on a slow-speed link to the Global Telecommunications System, a worldwide weather-data collection net. Their cyclone forecasting has improved over the years, "but the GTS link sometimes fails, and we cannot repair it," said Samarendra Karmakar, senior deputy director. "Our budget is limited."

Almost 200 miles to the south, where the merciless sea meets the overcrowded land, the women of Kutubdia wait in rebuilt bamboo homes for April and another cyclone season.

"I have no idea if we're safe now," said Ismat Ara, 32, who has borne four more children since losing her newborn that night in 1991. "If things are organized, maybe we'll be rescued."

Things are organized, said Syed Mohammad Zobaer, Disaster Management Bureau chief in Dhaka. He and others point to a "super" storm that struck in 1997 and took only 126 lives.

"The shelter system is very effective," Zobaer said. "It's a great achievement of the people of Bangladesh."

But that 1997 storm, luckily, hit at low tide and with a small surge. What would happen to the millions of the Bangladesh coast if, instead, another 1991 storm roared up the Bay of Bengal?

Abdul Shakur, 44, who clutched his boy in a treetop that night, was quick to answer.

"It would be like before," he said. "It would be as bad as '91."

[Last modified February 18, 2005, 19:12:04]