In the eye of the cyclone stands immobile the junta

With one look at the map, you can see how difficult the landscape is for delivering aid, crisscrossed as it is by rivers. As a highly fertile rice-growing area, with rich sedimentary soil and plentiful water, it is also densely populated. The human tragedy that is now coming to light cannot but be enormous.

Cyclone Nargis came ashore last Saturday (3 May 2008), right smack against the mouths of the Irrawaddy river, bringing winds topping 195 km/hour and a tidal surge reported to be 3 to 5 metres high. Not only must this surge have come rushing up the rivers and streams, but would have just simply swept over the low-lying land. Satellite photographs a day or two after show some 5,000 square kilometres of what used to be land now covered with water.

The brighter part of the map was where Cyclone Nargis hit.

 
Even in the main city Rangoon (Yangon), its 6 million people were left with neither electricity nor water supply and only now, days later, are these being fitfully restored. Roads were blocked with fallen trees and debris, roofs blown off homes and transport crippled.

In Rangoon, roads and rivers were filled with destruction. Photos from Chicago Tribune.

 
From the delta, there wasn't even news for days. Now we learn that whole villages have disappeared and the trickle of reports from survivors point to some 60 –70% of people in certain districts dead. Still speculative totals suggest that some 50,000 to 100,000 may have lost their lives. Those who have survived but are injured have no medical care. Those who aren't injured have neither food nor clean water. The floodwaters are a cesspit of disease, given the dead bodies floating in them, so even if you're alive today, you may be too ill to help tomorrow.

The cyclone that hit Myanmar at the weekend destroyed 95% of the homes in the city of Bogalay, where more than 10,000 people died, the minister for social welfare told reporters on Tuesday.

[snip]

"Ninety-five per cent of the houses in Bogalay were destroyed," he said, adding that most of the damage was caused by the 3.6 metre storm surge that accompanied the cyclone. 

-- The Times of India, 6 May 2008, 
95% of Bogalay city wiped out

On the map Bogalay is spelt Bogale, and as you can see, it is some 20 - 30 km from the open sea, as is Labutta (see photo below). Yet the storm surge washed in this far -- and continued even further inland.

This photo from AP shows a corpse in the Pyarmalot River near Labutta town. The town is right in the middle of the delta.

 
The map tells you that to deliver help to the delta, you will need a two-pronged strategy. You'll need a kind of naval invasion up the rivers even as a land force tries to thread its way from island to island.

A huge armada has to be anchored offshore with motherships transferring men and material to shallow boats and helicopters. Helicopters are good for surveying the area to assess priorities and for rushing in medical assistance and communication equipment, but it will take boats to bring in food, water and some sheltering material. The tonnages needed for these would be beyond the capacity of helicopters.

Even then, boats won't have an easy time getting through. What maps there were before would be inaccurate. The topography would have been changed by the storm. Satellite images can tell you which areas are covered by water, but might not tell you how deep. Channels may be blocked by collapsed bridges, accumulated debris, vegetation and corpses, not to mention newly silted sandbars.

It will require modern technology -- satellites, aircraft and helicopters -- to help guide the boats through, technology the Burmese state does not have.

Difficult though it may be to get aid through by water, it must be even harder to get it through by land. The Irrawaddy has one of the world's largest river deltas, for heaven's sakes, made up of thousands of islands and countless distributaries and streams. Roads may have been washed away and bridges broken. If you can see a road, you may also see a tree or pylon lying across it. It's going to take heavy equipment, or thousands of men with chainsaws and pulley ropes, to clear a passage through. Then you will need diesel for the equipment to work. And what do you do when you come face to face with a collapsed bridge? You need army engineers, for sure.

Forget about bypassing the roads and running supplies right across the fields. These are rice paddies, remember?

No one can imagine the Burmese government and their highly distrusted military able to mount an effort commensurate with the scale of the disaster and its urgency. The world stands ready to help, but more and more, the news is one of delays and resistance by government officials to letting foreigners move in. Visas must still be applied for and every minute's delay costs lives.

Neutral humanitarian aid agencies are getting through, but do they have the logistical capability to overcome the problems of delivery? Humanitarian agencies usually work in non-crisis conditions, relying on local transport and storage facilities to bring aid and relief to the target populations. A natural disaster of this magnitude needs the resources that only large, modern military machines can provide.

A few months ago, when a cold front gripped southern China in snowstorms, the Chinese government mobilised nearly a million soldiers and their equipment (bulldozers, trucks and the like) to re-open roads and reach isolated towns, and even then, they took weeks.

A truly concerned government would ask its ambassador at the United Nations to contact some willing countries with large naval and air forces and ask for help. It would allow the navies to anchor offshore and send their helicopters and boats in. It would throw open its border with Thailand and ask its neighbour to send in a convoy of bulldozers, trucks and heavy-lift equipment. To avoid confusion, it would divide the delta into zones letting different countries take the lead in their respective zones.

Bernard Kouchner, the French Foriegn Minister, said that French, British and Indian navies had ships directly opposite the worst-hit areas and were ready to help. "It would only take half an hour for the French boats and French helicopters to reach the disaster area, and I imagine it's the same story for our British friends," he said, according to the International Herald Tribune. "We are putting constant pressure on the Burmese authorities but we haven't yet got the go-ahead."

For its part, Spain has announced that it would send a plane with 13 tons of medicine, tents and drinking water to Thailand, while awaiting permission from the Burmese government to deliver the aid.

But of course, between misplaced pride and paranoid suspicion of foreigners, the Burmese junta is very unlikely to contemplate such a liberal response.

From Reuters comes this photo of the flooding near Rangoon's Mingaladon Airport.
 

The government in Yangon has let in little aid and has restricted movement in the delta, aid agencies say. It has not granted visas to aid workers, even though supplies are being marshaled in nearby countries like Thailand.

[snip]

Visa approvals have not been given for UN disaster relief specialists, the officials said. Of the several dozen employees of UN agencies waiting in Bangkok for visas, only a handful have received approval.

"We were very hopeful we would get positive responses," said Tony Banbury, the regional director of the UN World Food Program. "Unfortunately, we got no response."

The agency, one among a half-dozen with staff on standby, is flying in 45 tons of high-energy biscuits on Thursday morning from warehouses in Bangladesh, but has 13 personnel waiting to enter Myanmar to help with distribution. The junta agreed to allow the shipment only after a day of discussions, Banbury said.

-- International Herald Tribune, 7 May 2008, France
urges UN to force cyclone aid on Myanmar

And then there were more delays as the Burmese government demanded that aid agencies to hand the material delivered to them.

"When we informed them that we wanted to transport these biscuits by air, the initial response was, O.K., as long as you hand them over to us," he said. "That's not the way we operate. That turned into an all-day discussion. In the end they agreed that the World Food Program would be responsible for handing them out."

-- ibid.

The way things are going, thousands more may die. Tens, or hundreds of thousands injured are going to suffer unnecessarily. The million homeless may be living in the open for months.

Cyclone Nargis over the Bay of Bengal in the days before
ravaging the Irrawaddy delta. AP/NASA.

 
It was bad enough that no real warning was given to the people, even though the Indian government had relayed their advice to Burma.

The [Indian Meteorological Department]'s cyclone director, M. Mahapatra, tells VOA News regular advisories were issued to Burma from April 26, when the forming tropical depression was detected in the Bay of Bengal. He says his department followed up with subsequent bulletins as well as an e-mailed warning when it became apparent that Cyclone Nargis was going to strike Burma, also known as Myanmar.

"We issued the lengthy warning for Myanmar, that is, a cyclone is likely to cross [the] Myanmar coast - that bulletin was issued 36 hours in advance. We sent an e-mail actually, we could not get any reply. So there was no direct contact, but we had sent the bulletins as for the practice."

-- Voice of America, 7 May 2008, Indian Forecasters Gave Burma Advance Warning of Cyclone Nargis

Nargis may be a natural disaster, but the inefficiency and misplaced priorities of the Burmese government is making it shockingly worse. How many more such horrors must we witness before we see the backs of the generals?

© Yawning Bread 

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