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Death Traps Below the Big Cities |
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By Stephen Leahy*
The
ever-growing number of underground transportation networks, shopping
centers and parking ramps in the world's mega-cities are vulnerable
to natural disasters, warn experts. Not even the wealthiest cities
of the United States and Europe have given this serious issue much
thought.
BROOKLIN, Canada - Growing land pressures are
pushing the world's major cities underground and adding a new dimension
to their vulnerability to natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes
and tsunamis.
Currently, approximately half of the global population lives in
urban areas, and the proportion is expected to reach 65 percent
in 2030.
One of the hidden vulnerabilities of mega-cities to natural disasters
is the ''underworld'' of subways, shopping malls, parking ramps
and public utilities, Srikantha Herath, of the United Nations University,
said in a Tierramérica interview from Tokyo.
Nearly all of the world's major cities now have extensive underground
areas, including many in the developing world, because ''in densely
populated urban areas there is no other space to use," he said.
The matter was one of the many discussed by experts at the World
Conference on Disaster Reduction in Kobe, Japan, last week. Ten
years ago a major earthquake devastated this southwestern Japanese
city, causing 100 billion dollars in damages.
The disaster reduction conference came just three weeks after the
Dec. 26 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, a tragedy that has claimed
more than 220,000 lives and left millions homeless.
''Cities are by far the most vulnerable, and climate change is increasing
those risks,'' said Gordon McBean of the Institute for Catastrophic
Loss Reduction at Canada's University of Western Ontario.
Global warming is raising sea levels, making hurricanes, tornados
and related storm surges stronger and more frequent. Rainfall is
also becoming more intense in some regions, McBean told Tierramérica.
Nevertheless, little thought has gone into reducing the flooding
risks of urban underground areas even in North America and Europe,
said UN expert Herath.
Tokyo's extensive underground spaces have flooded 17 times in a
two-year span, with human lives lost as a result of storms and heavy
rains, he said.
Some underground infrastructures have very effective alarm and fire
containment systems, but not for flooding, according to Herath.
Often the entry points to the underground areas are the most dangerous
during flooding, and problems are compounded by the lack of underground
maps that would indicate where water can pass from one space to
the next, he said.
Like many mega-cities Tokyo is below sea level. Others are built
on flood plains and very vulnerable to storm surges, heavy rainfall
and, if located on ocean coastline, tsunamis.
Worst, much of the new urban development in the past 50 years has
ignored or forgotten extreme events that happen very rarely such
as once in a hundred years, Herath added.
McBean cited the example of the 1999 mudslides near Caracas, Venezuela
that killed 30,000 people.
''I remember thinking 'there's a disaster waiting to happen', when
I drove by a series of shantytowns clinging to the side of a mountain
the week before heavy rains triggered the mudslides,'' he said.
Those shantytowns, as well as the resorts damaged in the slides,
were built on top of deposits from mudslides that had occurred many
years before.
"The poorest people are always the most vulnerable to natural disasters,''
said McBean.
Some of the countries most vulnerable to natural disaster are Honduras,
Guatemala, and the Philippines according to researchers at the Earth
Institute at Columbia University in New York City. These are countries
that are prone to earthquakes and powerful storms, and also lack
the resources to cope with the impact and aftermath of such disasters.
Mexico City, Bogotá, Managua, Santiago, Lima, Quito, San José, and
Guatemala City are Latin American urban centers that are high on
the risk list of earthquake engineer Omar D. Cardona at the National
University of Colombia in Manizales. An expert on vulnerability
reduction and risk management, Cardona is the 2004 winner of the
United Nations Sasakawa Award for Disaster Reduction.
Reducing risk to natural disasters in large cities requires efforts
on many levels including economic, social, and educational, Cardona
said in an e-mail from Kobe, Japan.
According to McBean, it is essential to develop warning systems,
but that they must be effective in reaching the population, who
in turn must be educated in what to do.
The world's greatest construction boom in history is now underway
as urban areas grow to include another two billion people within
the next 25 years, and ''there's a big opportunity right now to
build proper housing for them," Brian Tucker, president of GeoHazards
International, a non-profit working on earthquake safety that works
mainly in Asia, told Tierramérica.
''The main problem is poorly constructed multi-story concrete housing
that become 'death traps' during an earthquake. By contrast, rural
dwellings of wood, thatch and mud are much less dangerous,'' he
said.
Most countries have building codes and zoning regulations that could
reduce the risk but they don't enforce their laws he said. "It's
not just a problem of corruption. Local officials don't have the
proper training or the positions don't pay well enough to retain
professional staff."
Some form of international standards are needed so that transnational
corporations don't invest in countries that fail to comply, said
Tucker. Governments ''need to be rewarded for doing the right things
before disaster strikes.''
* Stephen Leahy is a Tierramérica contributor.
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