Unfortunately, that’s just what happened in September and October 2010. Abdoulaye N’Dao, a gregarious retired electrician with grey dread locks says the flooding in 2010 “was the most difficult compared to earlier ones… there was a lot more water.” He says his house had water up to his ankles in some of the rooms; he and his extended family of 25 people were bailing water out of the house and its courtyard for days. “Maybe crocodiles and frogs can live like that,” he says months later sitting in his now drier courtyard, “but not people.”
The heavy rains of 2010 triggered the fifth year in a row of serious flooding in Pikine, and capped off one of the rainiest years for Senegal since 1971. Dakar got a total of 20 inches, more than twice the normal amount of annual rainfall. Oxfam already was working with an organization in Pikine called Eau-Vie-Environnement (Water-Life-Environment, or EVE for short), and deployed $295,000 from Oxfam’s “Saving Lives 24/7 Fund” to help EVE respond.
The needs were urgent in Pikine: Oxfam and EVE estimated that 150,000 people in 3,600 families were badly affected, either completely displaced or living in flooded homes. With help from Oxfam, EVE planned an aggressive response, which included:
A fast survey of the worst-affected areas of Pikine, to identify families in the most need: EVE and Oxfam decided to focus its assistance on 2,812 families (roughly 30,000 people) primarily in seven of Pikine’s 16 districts.
Supporting 116 pumps, to remove water from 643 homes, 7 schools, and 18 mosques: EVE supplied fuel for pumps that moved more than a million cubic meters of water, which is something like 264 million gallons, enough to fill more than 400 Olympic swimming pools. This took 15,000 liters (about 4,000 gallons) of fuel. EVE worked with local authorities to help remove water from 228 roads in Pikine.
Removing waste: household garbage and other waste pose a severe health threat, so EVE supported the removal of 3,000 cubic meters (roughly 105,000 cubic feet) of garbage.
Delivering sand: to build up low-lying areas and shore up buildings at risk of being submerged, EVE delivered 10 truckloads of sand to each of seven districts in the city.
Promoting good hygiene: EVE distributed 2,806 hygiene kits with soap, bleach, clean buckets for storing water, mosquito nets, and water purification tablets. In follow-up visits, EVE estimated that 93.8 percent of the households it visited were using adequate methods to treat water, and that these and other measures likely helped reduce diarrhea cases from 3.12 percent of the households to 1.48 percent.
Direct financial support: With funds from Oxfam, EVE allocated 40, 000 CFA francs (about US$80) to more than 1,500 of the most severely affected households, so they could buy food, medicine, and clothing.
Abdou Diouf, the executive secretary of EVE, says Oxfam did not just provide some assistance during the crisis and then withdraw along with the flood water. “This is the first time since Pikine has experienced these floods, that an [international] organization has intervened during the flooding and has decided to continue intervening after the flooding,” he says during an interview in his office in Pikine in April. Diouf says EVE was able to use a small amount of money left over from a grant from Oxfam to deal with floods in 2009 to prepare for the 2010 rainy season. When the heavy rains hit in 2010, volunteer assessment teams were already in place and trained to take action.
Oxfam also is supporting EVE’s work in 2010 to help local governments to lobby for funding they can use to improve drainage systems, and keep the pumps running in chronically flooded areas of the city.
Diouf also says the cash transfers represented “… a revolution in our intervention this year. People really appreciated this; I had people coming to the office here to specifically thank EVE and Oxfam for the money.”
Each recipient got about 40,000 CFA francs, which is about US$85. It’s unusual for an aid organization to provide money instead of food, clothing, water, and other assistance. But it allows those affected by the flood to spend the money on what they need the most, rather than what an aid organization decides is best for them.
When Assiatou Niang got her cash, she immediately thought about food. “We had no food, so I bought a bag of rice,” she says. With 30 people living in the household, including most of her nine children as well as those of her injured sister, food was a priority. “I also needed cement to repair the house, and I needed money for daily expenses around the household.” Niang is 58, and recently widowed. The cash helped her feed her family and cover other expenses for about a month over the winter.
Distributing cash is also economically efficient, according to Isaac Massaga, Oxfam’s program officer based in Dakar. “If you distribute rice in a community, you are preventing the local dealers from selling their own stock,” he says. “By helping people access food in the local market, we also help suppliers, and at the same time it helps maintain the market.”
EVE and Oxfam found a credit union that supervised the distribution of the funds to only those with vouchers provided by EVE according to the results of its household surveys. EVE transferred more than US$130,000 to families in Pikine.
]]>The death toll has reportedly reached nearly 800 people. The quake has affected an estimated two million people. News photos show collapsed highways, crumbled houses, and pancaked floors of concrete from Santiago south to Concepcion, Chile’s second largest city.
Slowed by a closed airport and damaged roads, Oxfam's emergency response team arrived in Santiago Tuesday morning and made their way to Concepcion, near the epicenter. Reports indicate the city was one of the most affected by the disaster. Team members also traveled to Constititucion, a coastal community hit hard by quake-triggered waves.
Oxfam's five-member team, including water engineers and logisticians, are assessing the situation and will return to Sanitago while the assessment results are considered and a decision is made on what Oxfam's response will be.
“Chile is a developed country with a very capable government and while it is unlikely that this disaster will be as severe as what we saw last month in Haiti, we want to be in place to help if we are needed,” said Frank Boeren, deputy director of Oxfam America's South America office.
In addition to the assessment team, Oxfam is planning to send some relief supplies–blankets, water buckets, and water filters–to Chile from a storage warehouse in Bolivia.
More than 90 aftershocks—some with magnitudes of 6.3 and higher—continued to rattle the region after the quake.
The disaster comes just weeks after a 7.0-magnitude temblor struck near the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince on January 12, leaving 230,000 people dead and more than one million homeless.
Poor construction practices, weak building codes, and a very limited ability of the government to respond added to the scope of destruction in that Caribbean country, the poorest in the western Hemisphere. Oxfam immediately launched an emergency response in Haiti, which includes the provision of water, sanitation services, and shelter, and aims to reach more than 500,000 people.
Though the quake that hit Chile Feb. 27 morning was substantially more powerful than the one that leveled great swaths of densely populated Port-au-Prince, the South American country is far better positioned to manage the consequences—and that will determine the level of Oxfam’s involvement.
“While this was a massively powerful earthquake, the capacity of the government in Chile and the resources it has available are fundamentally different from those of Haiti,” said Michael Delaney, head of Oxfam America’s humanitarian response department. “The role that Oxfam will need to play there will be markedly different from the response we are now carrying out in Haiti.”
]]>Torrential rains the previous weekend triggered the landslide and spread devastation across El Salvador. The disaster has left 184 people dead, and in Verapaz alone, more than 800 people have sought refuge in shelters.
Oxfam has been responding to the disaster by providing hygiene kits, water tanks, stoves, and kitchen utensils. The organization is now helping about 4,200 people and assessing the damage to determine how best to provide support as communities work to recover.
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UPDATE: April 2011
This note is to briefly explain why Oxfam has revised its view of its 2009 forecast of a likely rise in the number of people affected by climate-related disasters.
Two years ago Oxfam did an analysis of the number of people affected by past climate-related events. From this analysis we made a forecast that by 2015 it was likely that the average annual number of people affected by climate-related disasters would be 375 million and this represented an increase of 54 per cent compared with the average figure of the decade 1998-2007.
Having reviewed the data and the method we used to analyse the data we are no longer confident in the specific approach we used, given the nature of the data, as described below, and so we are no longer confident of this specific forecast.
Our concerns are essentially two-fold: the limitations of the data and the limitations of the way we analysed the data.
The limitations of the data: The data we used was from EM-DAT, the international disaster database managed by CRED, the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. This is a respected set of data which captures, amongst other things, the number of disasters that has happened and the number of people affected.
Like most sets of data it has its limitations. In EM-DAT’s case one of the key limitations is that the more recent data is more reliable. This was well known to us and we dealt with this in our analysis by using double exponential smoothing on the data (see the explanation of how we carried out the analysis and catered for the data’s limitation).
However one limitation we did not know at the time and have only recently discovered is that the number of people affected by climate-related disasters in China is unusually low in first half of the 1980s when compared with subsequent years. It is highly likely that this is the result of under reporting from China. Given the size of China’s population its disaster figures are significant when considering the global picture. The likely impact of this on our forecast may mean that we started our analysis with data from 1980 that was likely to be unreasonably low and therefore made our projected increase in the number of people affected artificially high.
We now know that there has been a significant increase in reporting from many other countries over the same period due to better information and communication.
Limitations of our analysis: Though we were clear in our explanation of the way we came to our conclusion that “different forecasting models could lead to different results,” what we should have done, particularly given the high volatility of the data especially in 2002, was run these different models to help determine the degree of confidence in the conclusion we came to.
It does not mean though that there will not be an increase in the numbers of people affected by disasters in the future. There is evidence to point to this likelihood.
According to EM-DAT the number of climate-related disasters has increased by 35 per cent from the 1990s to the 2000s. Floods have increased by 50 per cent over the same period. Munich Re’s database of global disasters also shows an increasing trend in climate-related events. It is not possible to know how much of this is an increase in events or better reporting of events and neither can we assume that an increase in events will lead to an equal increase in numbers affected.
Population growth means that there is a likelihood of more people being affected by climate-related events.
The number of people exposed to some climate-related events is also on the increase. According to the forthcoming United Nations Global Assessment Report 2011 the number of people exposed to floods and cyclones has doubled between 1970 and 2010. It is likely that many people who are ‘exposed’ to hazards are not affected due to measures that protect them, such as flood defences for example. However in many vulnerable countries investment and efforts to reduce significantly the risk of disasters is sorely lacking leaving millions exposed and likely to be affected by disasters.
Finally as the effects of climate change become more apparent there are more frequent and more intense climate-related events according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report.
Oxfam is in the process of further research into the number of people affected by climate-related events and will be publishing the results of this research in due course.
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I eventually made it to Mirogane, the main city in the department, which had also been severely affected by both Gustav and Hanna. Here things got interesting. As I made my way along Route Nationale #2, I began noticing trucks full of produce lined up on the side of the road. They were carrying avocados, bananas, and other fresh produce from the South and Grand Anse to be sold in the markets of Port-au-Prince. However, they would not make it to those markets because the bridge on the highway was 1.5 meters?or nearly five feet?under water. The women who had purchased the merchandise in order to resell it, were clearly distraught as the fruits and vegetables had already begun to rot.
As I neared the bridge, or where the bridge should have been, Haitian police officers were posted to prevent vehicles from attempting to cross. A few days earlier, the Haitian government formally closed the highway.
Already in the days following the closing of the road, a group of entrepreneurs had organized alternative transportation for foot passengers and small loads. A shuttle-ferry system had been established. For 15 Haitian gourdes—roughly 38 cents—a man carries you on his back or shoulders and puts you in a "chario," a small wooden boat. Once full, two or three men push the boat across the 229-foot stretch of water to the other side, where for another 15 gourdes, another man takes you on his shoulders to dry land. Here I was able to get on public transport into Port-au-Prince.
Despite this alternative transportation, the road closure combined with the extensive damage caused by the storms will have a great impact on the area. The inability of aid groups to use the road means that help will be slow to reach the isolated areas most affected by the storms. There are great public health risks and food security issues that will need to be addressed in the coming days, weeks, and months and access to the area is critical.
]]>Almost one week after Tropical Storm Hanna descended on Haiti, getting food and supplies to Gonaïves has been virtually impossible. The main road from Port-au-Prince was cut when a bridge collapsed just outside of St. Marc, and the road is cut off from the north, as the bridge in the neighboring town of Ennery was washed away. The alternative route through the Central Plateau proved difficult for large trucks carrying supplies, and rough waters have delayed planned shipments of humanitarian aid via boat.
According to UN estimates, 60,000 people are said to be in temporary shelters. "The conditions of those in shelters are horrific," says Rowley. "There is no food, water, cooking materials, basic toiletries or medical supplies, sleeping mats, or latrines. People are in desperate need of anything and everything. Many people have injuries to their feet, he adds, because they are having to wade through the water without shoes.
People are fleeing the town by the hundreds—on foot, in cars, whatever way they can. Some are moving up to the small plateau to the north of Gonaïves, others are going south.
Ogè Léandre, a 45-year-old father of six, explains how he and his family barely managed to get to the shelters in time. "The waters from Tropical Storm Jeanne [2004] did not reach us, so we did not think that we needed to evacuate this time. We packed up everything off the ground and stacked it on top of tables and beds. But then the water started to rise, and it did not stop. So we decided to go to the shelter. But the water was already so high and strong that I could not hold onto one of my children, and the water swept her away. Luckily someone was there to grab her. We got to the roof of the shelter, and about an hour later watched as our entire house was washed away."
In the meantime, Hurricane Ike grazed the northern coast of Haiti early Sunday morning, bringing more rain to Gonaïves and other towns in the Valley. The rain washed out the bridge in Mirebalais, and massive flooding and deaths are being reported in the town of Cabaret, just north of Port-au-Prince.
"We cannot wait for the roads and bridges to be repaired," says Oxfam's Humanitarian Coordinator Kone Amara. "We must get supplies into Gonaïves now. We are in contact with the United Nations' peacekeeping mission here to see how we can begin delivering aid with helicopters. The World Food Program is also preparing shipments by boat once the seas have calmed."
While Oxfam continues to evaluate the damage caused by Hurricane Gustav and Tropical Storm Hanna in other parts of the country, the agency is scaling up its first-response efforts to Gonaïves, where it has a shipment of drinking water and relief materials ready for distribution.
]]>Oxfam is simultaneously assessing the needs and distributing essential supplies in the department of Nippes, and we are coordinating with local authorities to provide support for six emergency shelters in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area. In the hard-hit city of Gonaïves, where lack of access initially thwarted relief efforts, the agency is now supplying families with basic household items and five-gallon containers of clean water.
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