Rolling the Stone Back up the Hill:
Preliminary Questions Raised by the 2001 El Salvador Earthquake
Dr. Ben Wisner
Vice -chair, Earthquakes and Megacities Initiative. Vice-chair, IGU Commission on
Risk and Hazards
Oberlin College, Environmental Studies Program.
Mailing address: 373 Edgemeer Place, Oberlin, OH 44074, USA. Fax: 440-775-8898.
bwisner@igc.org. Resumé
20 January 2001
Introduction
Ben: "But let's continue to
push!"
George Kent: "OK, Mr. Sisyphus."
These are very preliminary thoughts about the
earthquake in El Salvador that as of this writing has killed at least 700 people, with
perhaps another 2000 still missing, 45,000 people evacuated, tens of thousands of homes
destroyed, hospital capacity reduced by two-fifths, more than 1,000 schools severely
damaged (19%).
Why El Salvador?
This sounds so familiar. Why bother? Why have I spent a week reading through ReliefWeb (http://www.reliefweb.int/w/rwb.nsf) and
exchanging a blizzard of email communications with friends and colleagues all around the
world?
The reasons are many. First, El Salvador seems to
present a litmus test of the well known hypothesis (maybe mythic belief in the disaster
management cosmovision) that disaster opens a "window of opportunity" for policy
changes that reduce vulnerability to the next disaster. After hurricane Mitch, for the two
years 1999 and 2000, the Inter-American Development Bank and many other multilateral,
bilateral donors, aid agencies, and NGOs provided support not just for recovery but for
mitigation and prevention of further disasters. There was supposed to be a new mind set
that recognized the link between disaster risk reduction and sustainable development.
El Salvador was well placed to take advantage of this
aid and "new thinking" since it hadn't suffered the degree of damage that
Honduras and Nicaragua saw. In addition, it's long civil war (1980-92) was over.
Institutions that are needed achieve sustainable development were being build, democratic
institutions. Civil society was strong and active. Many of some 750,000 Salvadorans abroad
in the US were in a position to remit income. There was an active regional coordinating
body (CEPREDENAC) to
assist. The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and Organization of American States (OAS) were there to provide technical
assistance.
So I was struck by the seemingly dramatic collapse of
the myth of policy opportunities as silver linings.
I was also struck by the blatant failure to apply well
established knowledge. Haresh Shah had provoked a long discussion in 1999 along these
lines when the earthquake in Turkey forced him to call for a profound reconsideration of
the good of engineering knowledge if building codes aren't enforced. Preliminary and
anecdotal information suggests that the landslide that buried 200 homes in Las Colinas,
Santa Tecla, was partly due to economic development activities on the ridge above the
community. In the oblique, color air photo on the New York Times front page, Monday 15
January, one can clearly see that the slip begins where a road cuts across the slope.
Many of us are assessing what it achieved. There are
new initiatives that seek to carry forward the momentum of the Decade (initiatives by the
American Society of Civil Engineers, Earthquakes and Megacities Initiative, ProVention
Consortium, UN Development Program, among many others). Also, symbolically, we were only
two weeks into the third millennium. So I was forced to ask: is this still acceptable in
the new millennium? Is it to be business as usual for the media, for governments, for
donors, for agencies?
Or is it time that we say, with the Zapatistas, "Ya
Basta!"?
Here, then are some ideas about El Salvador, yes, but
also about the New World Order, the so-called "global" order. They are organized
around a partial list of themes. Please take all this as a starting point.
Here, in this website, (managed by Maureen Fordham
and hosted by Anglia Polytechnic
University, Cambridge, England) is a home for radical interpretations of disaster as
it appears all over the world. The word "radical" is used in the sense of radix
or "root", the root causes of vulnerability and what to do about it.
What Difference Can We Make?
The "what to do about it" is very important
and why one section of my notes is called "Knowing vs. Doing". One proposal I
have, to be elaborated elsewhere, is to bring science and politics together is a very
practical and concrete way. What we lack, among other things, are enforceable
internationally agreed standards for mitigation and prevention activities. What does
political theory tell us about a state that is incapable or unwilling to apply a body of
established knowledge, at low cost, that would protect its citizens from the kind of
landslide that killed so many in El Salvador? Is that good governance? Is that a
legitimate state?
There is here a dual question of developing and
disseminating low cost ways of identifying landslide hazard AND actually getting this
knowledge USED. This second is more a policy and political issue and has several parts
ranging from work toward internationally agreed standards in the context of a human rights
approach to citizens' safety, to work with citizen groups and local NGOs to give them the
information they need to DEMAND these standards be met by governments, to funding,
training, and administration issues.
I think that one of the follow-on activities after the
IDNDR could and should be for groups of scientific
specialists working with teams of law and policy experts to come up with proposed
internationally standard minimum expectations for all governments.
These would be minimum standard and would be realistic
in the sense that low-cost technology is available to achieve them.
Some form of treaty process would then have to win
agreement to bring the standards into force. Meanwhile the very process of developing the
standards and of working out the low cost solutions would increase general awareness.
Everybody wins.
This process would have to be arduous and painstaking
and detailed. At the moment in these notes I've
just addressed the case of landslide hazard identification. In the case of building codes,
for example, there is more agreement and wide spread practice. Just concerning earthquake
hazard mitigation and mitigation of possible secondary, collateral hazards (like
landslides) there would probably have to be a dozen or more working groups.
I invite all readers who want to participate in that
process to contact me at bwisner@igc.org .
Organization of the Notes
I discuss six clusters of questions and issues that have not been adequately addressed
during the IDNDR.
HUMAN RIGHTS
The most challenging questions, thought not at all
new, focus on whether human beings have a right to security from disasters triggered
either by extreme events in nature or by failure of human techno-systems. Despite
appearances, this is neither a childish concept nor strictly metaphysical or theological.
I am not kicking my heals at heaven or denying Buddha's Four Nobel Truths. We all do
suffer, sicken, grow old, and die. The question is whether as an acculturated species that
shapes its own "second nature", we are moving toward a shared belief that the
authorities responsible for social order have a responsibility to provide minimum,
internationally agreed safeguards against catastrophic events. Parallel debates from the
mid-1970s onwards concerning basic needs and human rights (see my book Power and Need in
Africa: Basic Human Needs and Development Policy. London: Earthscan, 1988) and the more
recent turn toward rights-driven approaches (e.g. by UNICEF and UNDP) suggest we are.
CULTURAL AND SOCIAL ISSUES
For a long time mental health was seen as a secondary
issue in disaster response and recovery. There was also a double standard: citizens of
rich countries could afford the "luxury" of counseling, but masses of poor
humanity in shelters or refugee camps could not. This has begun to change, however there
are still practices inherited from the commandist, military history of disaster management
that abuse the spirit and cause emotional suffering. Often still differences in dominant
urban vs. subordinate rural cultures cause friction and misunderstanding. For instance,
upper class, mestizo, urban professionals in Mexico City consider the Nahuatl world view
(cosmovision) and understanding of volcanos to be nothing more than superstition. They
have as little understanding or empathy for the conditions of daily life on the slopes of
the volcano Popocatepetl . When, in 1994, the Army stole farmers' pigs and chickens once
residents had been convinced to evacuate the eruption danger zone, one such technician
remarked that "a pig and a chicken make no difference to the GNP."
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
AND POLITICS
Countries like El Salvador are part of a system now called "global." Throughout
the 1980s there have been wave after wave of interventions by the international financial
institutions designed to manage external debt and to encourage growth based on free trade.
El Salvador emerged from its brutal land wars ("civil war", 1980-1992) into a
world where neoliberal principles of less government or other forms of social control and
more market control was almost unquestioned. NAFTA was two years away. However, complete
laissez-faire precludes effective control of land development in dangerous places,
regulation of dangerous factories and pollution, centrally funded and maintained
infrastructure accessible to the poor. A new global economic order has shifted and
reallocated risk socially and spatially (see John Handmer and Ben Wisner, "Hazards,
Globalization, and Sustainability: Conference Report." Development in Practice 9,3,
(1999), pp. 342-346). The ordinary people affected by market driven development are not
unaware of what is happening to them. Frances Fukuyama may think that history has ended,
but Superbarrio (a series of Mexican activists dressed as a masked wrestler) continues to
struggle with "greed" and "corruption" as opponents in performances in
the working class colonias of Mexico City. Opposition of political parties to the
"recovery" plans of the ruling party are part of a broader discontent with
dollarization and the stresses of globalization.
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
AND POLITICS
We approach the tenth anniversary of the Earth Summit
in Rio. "Rio + 10" is an occasion to look critically as the notion of
sustainable development. For cities it is impossible to conceive of "greening",
much less "sustainable development" without enforced land use
planning. San Salvador is not exceptional as a city where the brightest and the best write
plans and legislate regulations that are never implemented or enforced. Why? What can be
done about it?
KNOWING VS. DOING
It is not only the well established principles of
urban and environmental planning that fail to be applied. The IDNDR produced and
disseminated a wealth of shared scientific and technological knowledge in such areas as
earth science, engineering, hydrology, climatology, logistics, and public health. However
there are still huge gaps between science and government, science and the media, science
and educators/ opinion leaders, and science and the public. I focus on just one body of
knowledge below - landslide hazard identification - but the point should be considered a
general and challenging one.
STANDARDS FOR PREPAREDNESS AND
RESPONSE
My notes end on the same fundamental question with
which they began. Why are there no internationally agreed and enforced standards for
preparedness and response? There have been many efforts, especially during the past decade
of large and complex humanitarian emergencies. PAHO has pioneered a system for cataloging
and sorting medical donations. A large group of humanitarian agencies have successfully
produced a set of agreed principles and minimum standards for relief (see Humanitarian
Charter and Minimum Standards in Disaster Response. Geneva: The SPHERE Project, 2000;
http://www.sphereproject.org ). Despite these and other positive steps, we continue to see
government fail to stockpile and prepare in the most basic ways. Despite positive
experience and models of cooperation among UN and among bilateral agencies, we continue to
see waste and competition.
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