ARGENTINA: Flood Evacuees Have Spent Winter in Tents, Waiting

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Aug 25 2003 (IPS) - Around 3,000 people in the city of Santa Fe in east-central Argentina are still living in drafty warehouses and abandoned train stations, or tents that must be evacuated when it rains, four months after their homes were destroyed by flooding.

Luckily, the worst of the southern hemisphere winter is over. But the evacuees have little hope of getting into their new homes any time soon, because not a single brick has been laid despite the existence of several reconstruction projects.

Four months have passed since the tragedy that mobilised the entire country to send food, clothing, mattresses and medicine to Santa Fe in a massive emergency aid and solidarity campaign.

Thousands of homes were destroyed in late April when the Salado river overflowed its banks after several weeks of heavy rainfall, and overcame the dikes surrounding the capital of the province of Santa Fe. Many of the city’s 400,000 inhabitants were left temporarily or permanently homeless.

The roughly 3,000 people in the shelters are the last ”of the 140,000 people left homeless, and they have become the refugees of this environmental tragedy,” social worker Liza Tosti with the environmental association Proteger (To Protect) told IPS.

Tosti is in charge of coordinating the volunteers who have been working in the evacuation centres since the floods.

These families ”had already fallen into poverty, and now they have lost the little they had left: their homes, crops, household goods and furnishings, and even informal sector jobs,” said Tosti.

But the wait is not over for the evacuees, as none of the existing governmental or non-governmental plans for building new housing has gotten under way yet, architect Hugo Orlandi, with the government committee set up to oversee reconstruction efforts, told IPS. His group functions under the provincial administration of Governor Carlos Reutemann.

Three plots of municipal land have been set aside for building 360 homes in areas not prone to flooding, said Orlandi. But the 545,000 dollars earmarked for the project by the central government has not yet arrived, he added.

”We haven’t cleared the land yet because we are waiting for the funds to arrive sometime this week,” he said, adding that the homes that will be built for the people living in tents should be completed in four or five months.

Another project plans to build 447 housing units on property that belongs to the province of Santa Fe. A competitive bidding process for the project, which is to be partially financed by the National Housing Fund, ”will be opened in September,” said Orlandi.

He also reported that the provincial government had expropriated 35 hectares on which Caritas, an international Catholic humanitarian organisation, will build 250 homes, and the Salvation Army, an independent Protestant charity, will build 30.

In addition, said Orlandi, there is a plan to repair housing damaged by the flood, with contributions from Protestant churches.

In some Santa Fe neighbourhoods, the water reached the rooftops, while in other areas homes were completely covered by an enormous lake that formed.

Hydraulic engineers at the public Litoral University, environmental groups, and technical experts with the National Institute of Agricultural Technology say the catastrophe came as no surprise.

They blame the provincial government for negligence, saying it failed to control the emergence of slum neighbourhoods in areas subject to flooding and to build the necessary dikes, and that it ignored the warnings issued by environmentalists and meteorologists.

Despite such criticism, the works aimed at preventing a repeat of the catastrophe are only in the stage of public tendering, as is the case of a dike that needs to be built, and the widening and reinforcement of a bridge.

The flooding claimed at least 24 lives, according to the provincial government.

But human rights activists are demanding an investigation into what happened to 31 other people who remain missing. And Medicos del Mundo (Doctors of the World), an international health care and humanitarian relief organisation, said as many as 100 people were killed by the flooding, basing their estimate on interviews carried out for the organisation’s report on the tragedy.

”We visited a fisherman who the day after the flood tried to return to his home in a boat, to stay on the roof watching over his things, as many people did. That night he heard a child crying. He went out with his flashlight, and found two children floating on a board. Their parents had drowned,” said Tosti, her voice cracking with emotion.

The fisherman is taking care of the children, ages three and five, and no one has come looking for them yet, she said.

After the waters receded, many evacuees returned to their homes. In some cases, all that was needed was a major clean-up. But others had to toss out furniture and other belongings that had been ruined, and some families moved back into homes that are uninhabitable or pose a threat due to the dampness and structural weakness caused by cracks.

According to a report by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), the flooding in Santa Fe caused one billion dollars in losses.

The study reported that of 20,000 homes that were damaged but still left standing, 17,000 were totally ruined and should be replaced.

But of an initial 140,000 people left homeless, only 3,000 remain in the camps, warehouses or train stations, which means a majority of the families have returned to precarious shacks or dangerously damaged homes in areas at risk of further flooding, because they had nowhere else to go and could not wait for the government to do something.

The camps were set up on the outskirts of the city, in the areas of La Tablada and La Florida. The evacuees, crammed up to three families in one tent, have been living there all winter. Although chemical toilets with faucets were brought in, ”There are no showers, and they can only wash up a bit at the faucets,” said Tosti.

The tents, which are not waterproof, have been set up on land that floods when it rains. ”Each time it rains, they are evacuated, and they have to relive the trauma of an appalling tragedy,” she added.

Those who are being housed in the abandoned Mitre and Belgrano railway stations use the bathrooms in the stations, and have separated the old employee dressing rooms and railway platforms into family sections, using cardboard and other improvised dividers.

The children not only lost their homes, toys and other belongings, but have had to change schools and make new friends. They also suffer worse than adults from illnesses caused by the cold in the train stations, warehouses, and tents, and by the humidity in the tents.

Médicos del Mundo reported a huge increase in cases of bronchial ailments, gastroenteritis and lice among the evacuees.

Not all of the schools reopened after the flooding, because some were destroyed, as were hospitals, health clinics and community soup kitchens. The evacuees who were left without schools have been reassigned to public and private educational institutions that made space for them.

Provincial government buses pick the children up in the morning and take them to school, and bring them home in the afternoon.

But ”some mothers prefer not to send their kids to school because they are afraid that the buses will leave them in the wrong place, so we have volunteers who try to keep kids occupied in the camps,” said Tosti.

Several community organisations have complained that the government of Santa Fe is overly focused on the Sep. 7 provincial elections and has shown a profound indifference to the social consequences of the catastrophe.

The army serves the daily meals. But the evacuees say the assistance is provided in a ”militarised,” harsh and repressive climate.

”It’s really hard to get people to organise, to cook and resolve their day-to-day problems,” said Tosti.

The victims received a one-time indemnification payment of 450 dollars per family, and the provincial government has promised to provide a second payment of 250 dollars. But some families have not even received the first payment, due to bureaucratic hurdles.

Authorities are demanding proof of residency from people whose homes were literally swept away. Families have been denied compensation because their makeshift dwellings were located on land that was registered by the city government as ”green spaces.”

”These are families who were already extremely vulnerable because they are very poor, and have many kids, health problems, and precarious homes and jobs. Now they are waiting for help that isn’t arriving,” said Tosti. In her view, people will still be living in the camps at least until early 2004.

”There are reconstruction projects and international funds in the pipeline, but there is also a lot of controversy surrounding the land registries and relocation to areas that are not at risk of flooding,” she explained.

This Southern Cone country of 37 million is still in the grip of its worst economic crisis ever, with almost one in four people unemployed, and over half of the population living below the poverty line.