CENTRAL AMERICA: Early, Active Hurricane Season Portends Imminent Disaster

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Manuel Bermúdez

SAN JOSE, Jul 19 2005 (IPS) - Experts in Central America are bracing for imminent disaster this hurricane season, which is expected to be even more devastating than last year’s after an unusually early and active start.

Poverty and underdevelopment make the region especially vulnerable to natural disasters. Already this year, although Central America has yet to be directly hit by a hurricane, at least 37 people have died in Honduras and El Salvador, along with another 29 in Guatemala and three in Costa Rica, as a result of heavy rainstorms.

New reports of landslides, rockslides and collapsing buildings follow one upon the other as the death toll continues to rise, with women, children and the elderly accounting for most of the victims.

In November of 1998, Hurricane Mitch dealt a catastrophic blow to Central America with 10,000 deaths and five billion dollars in losses. In the wake of this tragedy, government authorities in the region have undertaken significant reconstruction and prevention efforts, but these remain far from sufficient.

The damage wrought by Mitch represented the loss of up to ten years of development in Honduras and Nicaragua, according to studies by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and these countries have nowhere near the necessary capacity to confront similar disasters today.

Consequently, another season of multiple high-intensity hurricanes would be sure to bring large-scale death and destruction to the region, despite efforts to mitigate the effects.

The first hurricane of the season, Dennis, claimed roughly two dozen lives in Haiti, Cuba and the United States earlier this month.

Hurricane Emily, the second this year, formed barely four days after the passage of Dennis, and caused one death in Grenada and four in Jamaica before slamming yesterday into Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, where no deaths were immediately reported. The storm is poised to make landfall again in northern Mexico and Texas, and will undoubtedly bring heavy rains to Central America.

So far, this year’s hurricane season, which officially runs from Jun. 1 to Nov. 30, has been the most active in recorded history, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Centre in Miami.

At the beginning of the season, the centre predicted a total of 15 or 16 major tropical storms for 2005, of which seven to nine could develop into hurricanes.

The social and economic realities portend catastrophic results if the path of a high-intensity hurricane passes through the region, despite initiatives like the Coordination Centre for Natural Disaster Prevention in Central America, which adopted a new 2006-2015 Plan on Jun. 23 with 339,000 dollars in donations from Norway and Sweden, earmarked for institutional strengthening.

An additional 50 percent of this amount will be contributed to the programme by the participating countries.

The National Emergency Prevention and Relief Commission in Costa Rica acknowledges that this country alone has close to 600 "vulnerable spots".

And according to Benedicto Girón of the National Coordinator for Disaster Reduction in Guatemala, there are roughly 200 areas designated as "high danger zones", which are home to around 400,000 people.

These individuals are particularly vulnerable, because even when they are warned of imminent disaster, they rarely evacuate their homes, because they simply have nowhere else to go.

There are a total of 38 million people in Central America, at least 60 percent of whom live in poverty.

Geographer Rolando Durán, one of the region’s top experts and an international consultant on disaster prevention, told IPS that although progress has been made in terms of organisation, major problems persist.

"We have managed to reduce the growth rate of vulnerability, but not vulnerability itself," he said. Nevertheless, he added, matters would be much worse if it were not for the measures adopted after Hurricane Mitch.

"The only way to reduce risk and vulnerability is through programmes, policies and laws that establish responsibilities," Durán stressed.

At the 4th summit of heads of state and government of the Association of Caribbean States (ACS), to be held Jul. 29 in Panama City, the leaders of the Caribbean nations – including Venezuela, Mexico and Colombia – will address the prevention and management of national disasters.

Although Hurricane Dennis merely glanced off the tip of Haiti and passed through almost the entire island of Cuba, it caused much greater damage and more deaths in Haiti because of Cuba’s far superior risk management systems, noted Durán.

In the areas of Central America with the greatest "institutional vulnerability," significant efforts have been made to reduce risks, but a long-term solution must come as part of the overall development of the region, he said.

There are two kinds of areas at particularly high risk, owing to socioeconomic factors: the marginalised urban sectors found in any Central American city, where the accumulation of waste in sewers and riverbeds raises the chance of severe flooding, and the low-lying regions along the Pacific and Caribbean coasts.

Since much of Central America’s population is concentrated along the Pacific coast, this is generally where the greatest damage is suffered.

But the Caribbean shorelines of countries like Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica are also extremely vulnerable, because they have been largely abandoned with regard to government policies and development plans.

In these areas, most socioeconomic activity occurs along the banks of rivers, where flooding can have devastating consequences.

Hurricane formation is fostered by high sea temperatures, which has led many experts to attribute the increase in the frequency and intensity of these storms in recent years to global warming.