23350: Fuller: deforestation is not the whole story (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Anne Fuller <affuller3@yahoo.com>

This letter appeared in The Haitian Times for Sept. 29-Oct. 5
  affuller3@yahoo.com

             As your editorial reaffirms, much of the blame for Tropical
Storm Jeanne’s ruinous passage through Haiti is advanced environmental
degradation, especially deforestation.  But this is not the whole
story.  In particular, it cannot account fully for the extraordinarily high
death tolls in Gonaïves and elsewhere.  What else is behind these?

             Haiti has virtually no civil defense system.  There are no
coordinated warnings or guidelines for evacuations.  There are no safe
solid places prepared to take refugees during emergencies.  Even people who
have heard hurricane forecasts on the radio don't know where to go to be
safe.  In this, the poor are at the highest risk: they are always hungry,
they are weak from chronic illnesses, they are illiterate, they can't
afford radio batteries and they have little access to telephones.  They
have no money to take a bus or truck to a safer area and nothing to feed
their children with if they got there.

             Most peoples' homes can ill withstand bad storms, even when
they are not built on eroded hillsides or ravines.  Roofs of thatch or
corrugated tin don’t keep desperate families from floodwaters.

             Almost no one knows how to swim, so drowning is a given if
waters sweep you away.

            Once a disaster has happened, there are no good systems for
getting people out, or fed, or re-housed.  There are no emergency workers
and no emergency equipment, unless the UN steps in.  There is not usually a
good notion of how many have died and the media and the government do not
name the dead; they are too many and they are poor people.

            Until some of these things change, Haiti will continue to
suffer twenty times the proportionate human toll of other countries each
time a hurricane comes anywhere in its vicinity.  Too great a focus on
deforestation-- a problem that will take decades to repair­-can lead to
neglect of policy reforms more readily accomplished-­that could save lives
next year.  Chief among these would be developing a national radio network
for emergency communications, identifying shelters and informing the
population of evacuation procedures.

Anne Fuller
Brooklyn, NY