US aid plane lands in Burma

BBC Online reports that the first US plane carrying emergency aid has landed in Burma – nine days after Cyclone Nargis!

The plane was carrying over 12,000 kgs of supplies, including mosquito nets, blankets and water. According to the BBC, "The US spent days negotiating with Burma's military government to gain permission for the aircraft to land."

This is a significant development in this emergency, as in the early days the Burmese had refused to allow US planes to land, and all commentators were saying that any aid worker with a US passport wouldn't be allowed into the country.

The BBC also reports that three Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) planes are due to be allowed into Burma soon.

The biggest worry is that although the military is showing signs that it is softening its hardline stance against foreign aid intervention and help in the disaster, the pace of their cooperation with international relief agencies, the UN and leading western aid donor countries is too slow and this natural disaster is going to turn into a humanitarian disaster

Over 1 million people are still very much at risk from the aftermath of this cyclone, and the reports indicate that there are still many, many dead bodies unretrieved from the disaster areas.

It is still important to exert pressure on the Burmese military junta to allow the smooth flow of the international relief effort into cyclone ravaged Burma – especially via putting pressure on the junta's international supporters: China mainly, but also their Asean supporters and neighbours including Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia.

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Burma disaster roundup

I trawled through a number of websites to find sources of information and insight into what is happening in Burma post the Cyclone Nargis disaster, and I made an effort to find out what other blogs and Burmese voices, especially from the region, are saying.

Also bearing in mind that the crucial issue now is how quickly the international emergency disaster relief can get into Burma and to the areas most in need, and the military's reluctance to ease their entry, I've also found some information from the aid and relief agencies.

The Burma Campaign (UK) have called for concerted international effort to force the Burmese junta to accept international aid. They are lobbying the British government, for one, to take a strong approach. They say:

"The United Nations has the power to authorise aid shipments to Burma even though the regime has not given permission. Yesterday the French government tried to secure a discussion on this at the Security Council, but it is believed to have been blocked by China and Russia.

“Every day of delay is costing lives,” said Mark Farmaner, Director of Burma Campaign UK. “If the regime won’t give permission for aid, the international community must deliver it anyway. We can’t stand by and let thousands more die.”

However the level of concern, verging on panic, over the junta's refusal to allow the free flow of aid, most sane international aid and Burmese democracy groups are, however, stopping short of calling for an all-out 'humanitarian' invasion of Burma a-la Somalia, if only just. Reason will prevail in this matter, I hope.

The Democratic Voice of Burma has an amazing gallery of photos of the damage in Rangoon, from which the photo above has been lifted. The level of damage in Rangoon is pretty bad, but Tim Costello of World Vision has reported on ABC Online that the city is beginning to put itself back together, as its citizens pick up the pieces.

However, columnist and blogger Awzar Thi, writing in Rule of Lords, reports that 90 per cent of the large trees in Rangoon are gone – uprooted or split and cracked. Besides the damage this has done to power lines, buildings and roads, this does not bode well for the future urban ecology of this major city. Awzar Thi has extensive coverage of the cyclone's devastation.

I found Rule of Lords via web correspondent Mong Palatino, who is blogging on the disaster at Global Voices Online, the online aggregator of political and social blogging of the non-Western world. He has been tracking many more bloggers and websites reporting from either within Burma or from its neighbours. The region has many political bloggers, it seems. He has found a number of eyewitness reports as well, including this quite representative one:

In our house we were trapped when tress around the house fell over after 11 hours of strong winds at 200-240 knots. The mess is terrible everywhere, with all electricity down and no water for days.

With one million homeless and facing terrible conditions, hunger, thirst, exposure to the elements and risk of disease are the major challenges, and the aid efforts must reach them as soon as possible.

One of the most heartbreaking things I've learned is how the children and babies have been affected. According to a Save the Children media statement I found, 40 per cent of the dead are children. The young are at the highest risk of water borne diseases, and most feel the cold, thirst and hunger.

Save the Children's Burma director, who I mentioned in my previous post, is quoted in that statement saying:

“We know that some areas are still completely under salt water – some people have no drinking water or food. Unless assistance gets into those kinds of areas very soon, the death toll will keep rising. It is a race against time and now our priority has to be those who are left - we urgently need help to be able to reach the surviving children and families and deliver what we know they need.”

Medisans Sans Frontier's Australian division has set up a page on their website to provide updated information on what is happening in Burma and what they are doing as part of the efforts. Thankfully, MSF has had workers in Burma for many years now who could respond quickly to the disaster, but they are running out of human energy, resources and supplies, and are desperately waiting for the planes carrying relief supplies to be allowed into the country.

I trust MSF to do the right thing in terms of their aid efforts, their capacity to look after people, and how they use the money they raise through fundraising for their emergency efforts. They proved themselves many times over, including in responding to the Boxing Day Tsunami in the West Sumatra region.

You can find out more about what MSF are doing, inlcuding a video, here.

The Burmese people need the help and generosity of the international community. And out continued attention to ensure the military regime don't keep stifling the aid efforts. Leave me a comment if you know of other ways to help.

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Cyclone devastation and the aid crisis in Burma

It is growing increasingly apparent that the extent of the death toll and damage in Burma from Cyclone Nargis is getting much worse – horrendous, in fact. It is certainly far worse that the Burmese military dictatorship can either handle or is prepare to admit.

So far, Burma's official death toll has jumped from 15,000-odd to about 22,000, but aid agencies are predicting it may reach 100,000, and at least 40,000 people are thought to be missing. Hundreds of thousands are thought to be homeless as a result of the devastation. Exacerbating the problem is the military's refusal to allow international aid agencies to freely enter the politically and socially isolated country to both assess the crisis and get aid to those who have been hurt, made homeless or otherwise affected by the storm.

The unpleasant but terribly urgent job of retrieving dead bodies – especially from the extensive river system of the Irrawaddy delta – must be done quickly if they are to prevent a massive outbreak of cholera and typhoid and other water-borne diseases – one of the big risks now, besides starvation and thirst. Electricity failure has compromised fresh food storage and there isn't enough clean drinking water going around. I heard on the news last night than aid deliveries of rice had begun arriving yesterday, but I couldn't help but wonder how the hungry were going to cook the rice when there wasn't clean water and precious little in the way of dry fuel.

This is where the infrastructure expertise and equipment of international aid and disaster relief agencies – especially the Red Cross – come into play: besides medical equipment and food, they have the water purifiers, electricity generators, portable cooking stoves, canvas and plastic for tents and shelters and, as importantly, sanitation equipment (so the already contaminated water doesn't get worse). What is troubling is that the Burmese military is dragging its heels in letting them in.

I cannot understand such a callous regime with so little regard for the lives of its own people and is so hell-bent on defending its own pride and power – and insisting with continuing with its charade of a constitutional referendum.

What is heartening is news that the Burmese people are throwing their energies into the job of helping each other, especially in the clean-up. One report on the radio this morning spoke of Burmese Red Cross volunteers, themselves victims of the devastation, are putting on the Red Cross vests and going out to help. They need to be congratulated and supported. They need help.

I have found that BBC Online's coverage of the turmoil in Burma far more effective, extensive and thorough than ABC Online's – despite Burma's proximity to us, and the large number of Burmese refugees now settled here in Australia, the ABC hasn't managed to make such a major humanitarian disaster a priority for its online coverage (it is heavily reliant on audio and video pulled from the rest of the broadcaster's coverage, compared to the specially developed text content on the BBC's site). Pity.

If you want to keep track of the relief effort, the BBC Online is publishing the diary of Andrew Kirkwood, Save the Children's 'man in Burma'. They are also publishing eyewitness reports of the devastation (Warning, the reports are quite disturbing), and background analysis of the cyclone and whether the military are responding adequately to it.

In the aftermath of the Boxing Day Tsunami, as with a number of other recent disasters in the region, there were a large number of blogs and websites set up to track, report, and pool news of developments in the relief efforts, and to help channel people's desire to help. I'm going to look out for these in relation to Burma's tragedy and I would appreciate any tips or links for these in the comments. I will keep following this as closely as I can.

Meanwhile, flickrites MaiNaSukhumvit, luisrene and Azmil77 have photos of Cyclone Nargis's trail of destruction.

[The image above is of the peak of the storm in Yangon, witnessed by Azmil77.]

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Bangladesh under flood

The horror that Cyclone Sidr created in Bangladesh is set to get worse, as the death toll is expected to pass 5,000. The Bangladeshi Red Crescent Society has already retrieved 3,000 bodies, and estimates that the toll could reach 10,000.

Villages have been flattened, survivors are traumatised, and the threat of water-borne diseases rises as both animal corpses and human bodies remain in flood waters. The problem of getting emergency relief and aid to the survivors continues, especially along the southern coast, where the category 4 cyclone hit. It has been described as 'catastrophic'.

But I'm sure you already know all that. Beyond this information from online news sources, however, I couldn't get much more. There was the usual about how the international community is pledging millions in aid and emergency relief, and how this is being called a 'calamity'. I wanted to know more about how the Bangladeshis are facing this tragedy, and what they are saying needs to be done.

So, I went in search of blogs and reports from Bangladeshis – either in Bangladesh or amongst the diaspora. Of course, the electricity supply in Dakha is unreliable, and pretty much out of action in the rest of Bangladesh, so this understandably makes new blog reports a little thin.

I did, however, find a blog that features posts by Bangladeshi women learning new skills – including blogging! – through the Nari Jibon Project. It also has some updates on the cyclone from the project's US supporter, Kathryn Ward. She hopes that the electricity will be back on within a week, but if it's not, she intends to get the women's stories of the cyclone over the phone from the US and post them on the blog. So, there should be more coming up there in the next week.

There's more news and posts via the blog aggregator, Global Voices, which promotes blogs from across the world, especially Asian, African, Latin American, Eastern European and Pacific voices. (This is a welcome change from the blogs I usually read. 'The world is talking', as they say, 'Are you listening?' )

Blogger Rezwan, originally from Bangladesh, has aggregated a bunch of news and posts on Cyclone Sidr for Global Voices, including information on how Bangladeshi bloggers followed the cyclone as it hit the coast. There are more updates at Rezwan's blog, The 3rd world view.

If you don't want to stand by helplessly, Rezwan has some good insights into the international aid needs for cyclone-hit Bangladesh.

Medicins Sans Frontieres Australia have not yet announced a specific appeal for Bangladesh, but if you're looking for a reputable emergency relief and aid agency that puts most of its donations into helping those in need, rather than in advertising or admin, then I'd suggest supporting their work.

The same goes for Oxfam Australia, who have launched a specific Bangladesh appeal, and are providing information on what they're doing there.

[Satellite image of Cyclone Sidr about to hit Bangladesh from here]

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A flood of pestilence

Jakarta's hospitals are struggling to deal with the hundreds of flood victims who have sought treatment in the aftermath of the worst flooding Jakarta and its surrounding areas have experienced in five years, according to ABC News Online.

Some 200,000 people have suffered from flood-related illnesses and there are fears that disease could spread with hundreds of people still displaced from their homes and thousands living in homes with no clean water or plumbing.

Ddealing with the outbreak of disease is one of the main problems in the aftermath of any disaster. Flood waters make things worse. A spokesperson for the National Coordinating Agency for Disaster Management says:

"There are 757 in-patients, most of them are suffering from diarrhoea, skin diseases, dengue, leptospirosis and severe respiratory problems."

The Indonesian Red Cross warns of that "danger rotting dead animals" pose for spreading disease after the floods.

The floods have killed 94 people so far.

Last night, my partner and I discussed some recent WorldChanging posts on climate change and 'climate foresight' – thinking about how we should anticipate and prepare for life under a changed climate that brings greater risk, disasters and problems to our habitats, not to mention possible threats of war, terrorism or other economic conflict. We speculated whether we should prepare our children to live in such a world. As we listed a range of possible scenarios of disaster, conflict, threats to health and more, we wondered whether having such a discussion in the first place was a) being paranoid, b) focusing on calamity rather than solutions, and c) betraying hope.

Eerily, this morning I came across another WorldChanging post by Chad Monfreda, whose list of calamities we will face resulting from climate change mirrored ours:

A planetary fever is about to deal a wallop of catastrophic floods, insect borne disease, deadly heat waves, and an all around worsening of the risks people face everyday across the world.

It can be considered quite heretical to talk about 'adaptability' rather than working on cutting emissions and reversing global warming, because we're urgently required to work on solutions rather than calamities. But, as Monfreda also wonders,

… if human vulnerability gives climate change saliency, aren’t direct adaptations to current risks a more efficient way to meet our goals than greenhouse gas mitigations that would have an indirect effect decades away?

In some contexts and extents, we are already doing this. In bush fire prone parts of Victoria, people are urged to develop their 'bush fire plans', i.e. plans that set out clearly what families will do in the event their homes are threated by bush fire – prepare defences, decide to stay or flee early, etc (as last minute decisions and evacuations, and panic being significant causes for fire-related injury and death).

Where I grew up, during the monsoon season, TV and radio announcements urged people to prepare to evacuate their homes in the event of flooding, and to ensure their important documents and identification papers were handy to grab with them to safety. Are these situations we will have to prepare our children to face in Australia? Families in northern Queensland are already facing this situation. Is this abandoning hope, or being realistic?

As Monfreda puts it, "it's time to start making our systems more resilient to the effects of climate change, even while we work to limit the magnitude of climate disruption," something other WorldChanging writers have argued for before. I'd say we need to make our selves and our children more resilient too.

[The amazing photos are by Yay!, which I found when WorldChanging published the top one. He has a flickr set on the Jakarta flood.]

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Katrina's damage continues

I've been way too busy to write for this blog, but I highly recommend Barista's look at Katrina a year on.

He has pulled together some eye-opening information on the damage caused, and how so many people have been displaced and still affected by it. He cites:

Fewer than 35% of New Orleans’ 462,000 residents had returned to the city as of March. Only half are expected to return by September 2008.

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"I looked out at the weather and it was terrible"

Causing extensive damage as it hit the Queensland coast at Innisfail (south of Cairns; see the red pointer on the map below), Cyclone Larry is now making its way inlad over the Atherton Tablelands.

The satelite image from the Bureau of Meteorology website is certainly frightening, but looking at a map of the area and hearing the news on radio this morning has raised more cause for alarm: that part of Queensland's coast has many small towns and hamlets, all of whom would have suffered extensive damage from the cyclone.

There is more news at ABC Online here. There are calls for public support for the cyclone victims. Even as it is still unclear which non-governmental aid agencies are helping, generosity is still demanded of us. Though this doesn't mean we shouldn't be vigilant of which aid agencies we can really trust to get the urgent short-term and long-term rebuilding aid out to the remote communities – especially the Indigenous ones!

I was reminded of the quote from the Epic of Gilgamesh, the ancient Sumerian myth which has an incredible flood story, that Tim Flannery uses to start his chapter on rising ocean levels in The Weather Makers:

The evening came, the rider of the storm sent down rain. I looked out at the weather and it was terrible… With the first light of dawn a black cloud came from the horizon;… the God of the storm turned daylight into darkness.

No, I'm certainly NOT suggesting that Cyclone Larry was directly caused by Global warming and thus greenhouse gasses. I just find the parallels compelling.

Remember to think of the people in trouble.

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