The inequities of disasters

Natural disasters have a tendency of becoming real time dramas. Heart-wrenching stories of death and destruction mingling with incredible tales of heroic rescues turn into thriller-like scripts for news channels, keeping viewers/readers riveted. While it might seem callous to say so, the media loves a good disaster! Not all disasters are viewed equally, though. Some are made more gripping than others.

The summer rains have already come down hard in various regions around the world and the ensuing floods have become front page news in these countries. Central Europe (Czech Republic, Germany, Austria), India and Canada are currently dealing with the aftermath of massive flooding in many of its regions where the rivers are overflowing.

In Canada, where the northern province of Alberta and particularly the city of Calgary has been deluged, images of submerged residences and people in shelters have taken over the newscast. In the worst flooding that Alberta has ever seen, at least 100,000 people were forced to evacuate last week when the river first began to overflow. But while the situation is dire, the state apparatus has already come to the rescue of the affected Albertans and the Premier has announced an initial $1 billion disaster relief package. Total damages in the province are being estimated to be around $3 to $5 billion.

In India, floods and landslides in the Uttarkhand State have left 150,000 people displaced and many of the pilgrims to Ganges are still stranded as the water has inundated the areas along its banks. The army and air force are struggling with the rescue operations along the Ganges and in the town of Bandrinath where pilgrims await rescue. The United States has announced that it will provide $150,000 in emergency relief but with negligible media focus on this disaster, no other substantial relief package has been announced yet. In fact, the disaster is not even on the international news radar.

The intensity of a disaster and its newsworthiness is determined in newsrooms it seems.

Global incidents vie for first place in the news, but there is always someone making that choice of headlines for the public which depends on the social status of the region.

A tragedy is made palpable by streaming devastating images into TV lounges at prime time and onto our breakfast table with the morning paper.

In the case of the earthquake in Haiti the media machinery had come into full play, moving the entire world to pour relief into a country notorious for its history of political violence and lawlessness. If it weren’t for a sustained, frame by frame media coverage — for whatever political reasons — the overwhelming outpouring of grief for Haiti and the subsequent economic relief would probably not have occurred.

The images now filtering in from the Alberta disaster are compelling fellow Canadians around the country to donate for flood relief — though Alberta is an oil rich province and its per capita GDP is probably the highest in Canada since it enjoys high revenue from oil and natural gas extraction.

The billions being estimated to rehabilitate the modern city of Calgary in Canada will surely include a state of the art infrastructure that the city had before the destruction. The more developed a disaster zone, the more money its rehabilitation consumes. In Japan, the damage was estimated at $620 billion after the tsunami.

But in the temple town of India, where existing infrastructure includes dirt roads, stone temples and brick houses, the rehabilitation budget will probably not even be one/tenth of Alberta’s.

The burden of natural disasters always falls on the socially disadvantaged. And particularly, when the media attention moves away, those with the wherewithal — like the Canadians in Alberta — will be able to get back on their feet fairly easily, but the poorer inhabitants of small towns like Bandrinath in India will have huge survival problems. For them to regain even the very meagre source of income that they would have previously survived on, will become an uphill task.

The Pakistan rains in July and August are yet to come. We have seen our share of destruction and the villages have still not fully recuperated from the last two successive floods of 2010-2011. It would be prudent for our government to take preventive/pre-emptive measures as outside help is always slow in coming to Pakistan, a socially outcast nation. The international media, which is quick to shine a spotlight on our nefarious doings, is not as empathetic to our disasters as it was to Haiti or even to Japan and we will be left struggling for attention.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 27^th, 2013.

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