Pakistan flood sets back infrastructure by years, By Carlotta Gall, August 26, 2010, New York Times: “Men waded waist deep all week wedging stones with their bare hands into an embankment to hold back Pakistan’s surging floodwaters. It was a rudimentary and ultimately vain effort to save their town. On Thursday, the waters breached the levee, a demoralizing show of how fragile Pakistan’s infrastructure remains, and how overwhelming the task is to save it. Even as Pakistani and international relief officials scrambled to save people and property, they despaired that the nation’s worst natural calamity had ruined just about every physical strand that knit this country together – roads, bridges, schools, health clinics, electricity and communications. The destruction could set Pakistan back many years, if not decades, further weaken its feeble civilian administration and add to the burdens on its military. It seems certain to distract from American requests for Pakistan to battle Taliban insurgents, who threatened foreign aid workers delivering flood relief on Thursday. It is already disrupting vital supply lines to American forces in Afghanistan…”
Tag: Natural disasters
Children’s Mental Health Post-Hurricane Katrina
Children of Katrina still are suffering, By Janet McConnaughey and Lindsey Tanner (AP), August 24, 2010, Detroit Free Press: “A startling number of children displaced by Hurricane Katrina still have serious emotional or behavioral problems five years later, a new study found. More than one in three children studied — those forced to flee their homes because of the August 2005 storm — have been diagnosed since then with mental health problems. These are children who moved to trailer parks and other emergency housing. Nearly half of the families studied still report household instability, researchers said. ‘If children are bellwethers of recovery, then the social systems supporting affected gulf coast populations are still far from having recovered from Hurricane Katrina,’ the researchers said. The study was published online Monday in the journal Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness. Lead author David Abramson of Columbia University in New York said researchers were astonished by the level of distress…”
Haiti Earthquake and the Displaced
In Haiti, the displaced are left clinging to the edge, By Deborah Sontag, July 10, 2010, New York Times: “Hundreds of displaced families live perilously in a single file of flimsy shanties planted along the median strip of a heavily congested coastal road here called the Route des Rails. Vehicles rumble by day and night, blaring horns, kicking up dust and belching exhaust. Residents try to protect themselves by positioning tires as bumpers in front of their shacks but cars still hit, injure and sometimes kill them. Rarely does anybody stop to offer help, and Judith Guillaume, 23, often wonders why. ‘Don’t they have a heart, or a suggestion?’ asked Ms. Guillaume, who covers her children’s noses with her floral skirt when the diesel fumes get especially strong. Six months after the earthquake that brought aid and attention here from around the world, the median-strip camp blends into the often numbing wretchedness of the post-disaster landscape. Only 28,000 of the 1.5 million Haitians displaced by the earthquake have moved into new homes, and the Port-au-Prince area remains a tableau of life in the ruins. The tableau does contain a spectrum of circumstances: precarious, neglected encampments; planned tent cities with latrines, showers and clinics; debris-strewn neighborhoods where residents have returned to both intact and condemnable houses; and, here and there, gleaming new shelters or bulldozed territory for a city of the future…”