The pulverised beach in Kalmunai, located in eastern Sri Lanka, was stripped of most of its standing structures by the ferocity of the waves. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Nov 8 2021 (IPS)

While negotiators from all over the world have been discussing, since 31 October 2021 in Glasgow, every single word, coma and dot in order to reach a final text that is expected to apparently keep everyone happy but really not everybody satisfied, 50% of world’s population will live in coastal areas, exposed to floods, storms and tsunamis by the year 2030.

The alarm bell rang during the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26), hosted in Glasgow by the United Kingdom, which is scheduled to end on 12 November with a final accord including a set of promises that, hopefully, will be met… unlike the previous unfulfilled ones.

The alert was sounded on 4 November on the occasion of this year’s World Tsunami Awareness Day.

What are tsunamis?

Tsunamis are rare events but can be extremely deadly. In the past 100 years, 58 of them have claimed more than 260,000 lives, or an average of 4,600 per disaster - more than any other natural hazard

The word “tsunami” comprises the Japanese words “tsu” (meaning harbour) and “nami” (meaning wave). A tsunami is a series of enormous waves created by an underwater disturbance usually associated with earthquakes occurring below or near the ocean, according to the World Tsunami Day, which adds the following:

Volcanic eruptions, submarine landslides, and coastal rock falls can also generate a tsunami, as can a large asteroid impacting the ocean. They originate from a vertical movement of the sea floor with the consequent displacement of water mass.

Tsunami waves often look like walls of water and can attack the shoreline and be dangerous for hours, with waves coming every 5 to 60 minutes.

The first wave may not be the largest, and often it is the 2nd, 3rd, 4th or even later waves that are the biggest. After one wave inundates, or floods inland, it recedes seaward often as far as a person can see, so the seafloor is exposed.

The next wave then rushes ashore within minutes and carries with it many floating debris that were destroyed by previous waves.

What are the causes of tsunamis?

Earthquakes – They can be generated by movements along fault zones associated with plate boundaries.

Most strong earthquakes occur in subduction zones where an ocean plate slides under a continental plate or another younger ocean plate.

All earthquakes do not cause tsunamis. There are four conditions necessary for an earthquake to cause a tsunami:

• The earthquake must occur beneath the ocean or cause material to slide into the ocean.
• The earthquake must be strong, at least magnitude 6.5 on the Richter Scale
• The earthquake must rupture the Earth’s surface and it must occur at shallow depth – less than 70km below the surface of the Earth.
• The earthquake must cause vertical movement of the sea floor (up to several metres).

Landslides – A landslide which occurs along the coast can force large amounts of water into the sea, disturbing the water and generate a tsunami. Underwater landslides can also result in tsunamis when the material loosened by the landslide moves violently, pushing the water in front of it.

Volcanic eruptions – Although relatively infrequent, violent volcanic eruptions also represent impulsive disturbances, which can displace a great volume of water and generate extremely destructive tsunami waves in the immediate source area.

One of the largest and most destructive tsunamis ever recorded was generated in August 26, 1883 after the explosion and collapse of the volcano of Krakatoa, in Indonesia. This explosion generated waves that reached 135 feet (41,15 metres), destroyed coastal towns and villages along the Sunda Strait in both the islands of Java and Sumatra, killing 36,417 people.

Extraterrestrial collisions – Tsunamis caused by extraterrestrial collisions (i.e. asteroids, meteors) are an extremely rare occurrence. Although no meteor/asteroid-induced tsunamis have been recorded in recent history, scientists realize that if these celestial bodies should strike the ocean, a large volume of water would undoubtedly be displaced to cause a tsunami.

Rapid urbanisation and growing tourism in regions prone to tsunamis, are also putting even more people in harm’s way.

Rare but deadly

Tsunamis are rare events but can be extremely deadly.

In the past 100 years, 58 of them have claimed more than 260,000 lives, or an average of 4,600 per disaster – more than any other natural hazard.

The highest number of deaths occurred in the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004, which caused an estimated 227,000 fatalities across 14 countries. Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand were the hardest hit.

Just three weeks after the disaster, the international community came together in Kobe, Japan, and adopted the 10-year Hyogo Framework for Action, the first comprehensive global agreement on disaster risk reduction.

They also created the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning and Mitigation System, which uses seismographic and sea-level monitoring stations to send alerts to national tsunami information centres.

In his message marking this year’s World Tsunami Day, the UN Secretary-General called on all countries, international bodies, and civil society, to increase understanding of the deadly threat, and share innovative approaches to reduce risks.

“We can build on progress achieved – ranging from better outreach to tsunami-exposed communities around the world, to the inclusion of a Tsunami Programme in the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development”, António Guterres said. However, he cautioned that the risks “remain immense.”

“Rising sea levels caused by the climate emergency will further exacerbate the destructive power of tsunamis.”

The 2021 World Tsunami Awareness Day was meant to promote the “Sendai Seven Campaign,” specifically the target that looks to enhance international cooperation to developing countries, those who are most at risk.

All this sounds fine. But: are all half of the world population who will be exposed to such deadly threats in just eight years from now, are they aware of the arduous wording exercise among negotiators in Glasgow to formulate a ‘politically correct’ declaration?

View of the Third World Conference for Disaster Risk Reduction (WCDRR) in Sendau, Japan. Vanuatu’s President Baldwin Lonsdale told delegates he was attending because the Pacific island, hit by Cyclone Pam in early March, “wants to see a strong new framework on disaster risk reduction which will support us in tackling the drivers of disaster risk such as climate change". Credit: Katsuhiro Asagiri/IPS

By Jamshed Baruah
SENDAI, Japan , Mar 16 2015 (IPS)

Cyclone Pam has not only caused unprecedented damages to the Pacific island of Vanuatu but also lent urgency to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s plea that disaster risk reduction is in “everybody’s interest”.

“Sustainability starts in Sendai,” Ban declared at the opening of the Third World Conference for Disaster Risk Reduction (WCDRR), the largest-ever high-level meeting on the theme, which kicked off on Mar. 14 in Sendai, the centre of Japan’s Tohoku region, which bore the brunt of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that led to the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster.

The conference is expected to conclude with the adoption on Mar. 18, when WCDRR is scheduled to close, of a new agreement on disaster risk reduction, which will provide guidance on how to reduce mortality and economic losses from disasters.“Disaster risk reduction advances progress on sustainable development and climate change [which] is intensifying the risks for hundreds of millions of people, particularly in small island developing states and coastal areas” – U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

“This is the first stop on our journey to a new future to put our people of the world and this world onto a sustainable path,” Ban told government leaders and civil society representatives from around the world.

“Disaster risk reduction advances progress on sustainable development and climate change,” Ban said, adding that “climate change is intensifying the risks for hundreds of millions of people, particularly in small island developing states and coastal areas.”

Experts consider climate change as the cause for the increasingly unpredictable pattern of cyclonic activity affecting Vanuatu in recent years.

“I speak to you today with a heart that is so heavy,” said Vanuatu’s President Baldwin Lonsdale addressing the opening session, visibly fighting back his tears. “I stand to ask you to give a lending hand in responding to this calamity that has struck us.”

This is indeed a major calamity for the Pacific island nation. Every year it loses six percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) to disasters. “This cyclone is a huge setback for the country’s development. It will have severe impacts for all sectors of economic activity including tourism, agriculture and manufacturing,” said Lonsdale.

“The country is already threatened by coastal erosion and rising sea levels, in addition to five active volcanos and earthquakes. This is why I am attending this conference and why Vanuatu wants to see a strong new framework on disaster risk reduction which will support us in tackling the drivers of disaster risk such as climate change.”

As Vanuata reeled under the impact of the cyclone, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of japan pledged four billion dollars in disaster prevention aid, mainly for developing countries.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) launched an initiative on Mar. 15 to scale up community and civic action on resilience, the so-called ‘One Billion Coalition for Resilience’.

The IFRC has committed itself to mobilising its network of 189 national Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and 17 million volunteers around the world to increase different services that link disaster preparedness, emergency response and longer term recovery needs of local communities.

The Special Representative of the U.N. Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction, Margareta Wahlström, commended the IFRC’s efforts to galvanise actions toward making communities more resilient.

“We need to scale up our collective efforts to make sure that hazards don’t become disasters, and we will only be able to achieve this by building alliances at every level,” she said. ”Only in partnership can we contribute to transforming the lives of the most vulnerable people and support their efforts in building stronger communities.”

Apparently realising the need of the hour, top insurers from around the world have called on governments to step up global efforts to build resilience against natural disasters, highlighting that average economic losses from disasters in the last decade have amounted to around 190 billion dollars annually, while average insured losses were at about 60 billion dollars.

A ‘United for Disaster Resilience Statement’ was released Mar. 14 by top insurance companies, members of the UNEP Finance Initiatives’ Principles for Sustainable Insurance (PSI), the largest collaborative initiative between the United Nations and the insurance industry. PSI is backed by insurers representing about 15 percent of the world’s premium volume and nine trillion dollars in assets under its management.

The statement urges governments to adopt the U.N. Post-2015 Framework on Disaster Risk Reduction, emphasising that the insurance industry is well placed to understand the economic and social impact of disasters given that its core business is to understand, manage and carry risk.

Lauding the initiative, Achim Steiner, U.N. Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), said: “The vision and initiative demonstrated by the insurance industry – from the launch of the landmark Principles for Sustainable Insurance at the Rio+20 conference to the strong, united commitments made here in Sendai – provide inspiration and a way forward.”

Another PSI initiative launched in Sendai called on individual insurance organisations to help implement the Post-2015 Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction by making voluntary, specific, measurable and time-bound commitments.

The voluntary commitments will follow the global framework afforded by the four Principles for Sustainable Insurance, and will show concrete actions that build disaster resilience, and promote economic, social and environmental sustainability.

These commitments will be aggregated and promoted en route to a major UNEP and insurance industry event in May this year, which will be hosted by the global reinsurer, Swiss Re.

The commitments will also be promoted by the PSI at the Global Insurance Forum of the International Insurance Society in New York in June. The forum will include a dedicated day at the U.N. headquarters for insurance industry leaders and U.N. officials to address sustainable development challenges and opportunities, from climate change and disaster risk, to financial inclusion and ageing populations.

Edited by Phil Harris    

A sinkhole is widening in Car Nicobar, but the authorities are clueless about its potential dangers. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS.

By Malini Shankar
CAR NICOBAR, India, May 2 2014 (IPS)

While the United States Geological Survey (USGS) is sparing no effort to fill a rapidly widening sinkhole in Florida since Apr. 23, India’s Geological Survey has closed its field station in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands where sinkholes have sprung up all over as an aftermath of the 2004 Asian tsunami.

The administration in this popular tourist destination in the Bay of Bengal may be prepared for another tsunami. But it seems clueless about these holes in the ground that can sometimes cave in or lead to other geological events like hot springs, water spouts, natural gas emissions or even cracks in the subterranean magma chambers.They have accounted for the disappearance of human beings, livestock, rivers, buildings and vehicles.

Islanders told IPS that sinkholes have appeared all over Nicobar. Whether that is also the case with the Andamans remains a matter of speculation as there is no official documentation of it, nor did the administration facilitate this writer’s photo assignment to visit the geologically volatile islands.

IPS discovered and photographed sinkholes in three Nicobar Islands – Car Nicobar, Kamorta and Campbell Bay.

“Car Nicobar is full of sinkholes after the tsunami. Even though I grew up here, our parents are now petrified of us swimming near the beach,” says Dr. Christina Rossetti, a local of Car Nicobar who works at a government-run hospital here.

Indian Air Force officers at Car Nicobar documented a water spout in April 2013 which shot up from a sinkhole to 1,000 metres in the sky over the Bay of Bengal.

Tsunami survivors in Car Nicobar also told IPS about water spouts that injured their eyes during the disaster.

Sinkholes can be either the cause or the consequence of quicksand, hot springs, geysers, natural gas emissions or water spouts. Initially the surface starts collapsing.

“Usually the depression goes on increasing in depth and it transits from depression to saucer to cup,” Dr. Arun Bapat, formerly head of earthquake engineering research at the Central Water and Power Research Station in the western Indian city of Pune, told IPS.

“Sinkholes are usually formed in calcareous formation. The reduction or dissolution of calcium due to drainage or erosion or natural flow of water can cause sinkholes. Earthquakes are not the main cause of sinkholes. But it is possible that in calcareous rock, when a landslide has occurred during or immediately after earthquake, landslides could lead to sinkholes,” says Bapat.

Sinkholes look deceptively benign, but anything from quicksand to natural gas could be hidden beneath, deceiving people and livestock who may innocently trample the surface and be swallowed into geysers or cavernous black holes in the ground.

Sinkholes, which range from a few centimetres to 600 metres in diameter, can appear in the aftermath of big seismic events.

Referring to Thailand, the 2005 United Nations Environment Programme report ‘Rapid Assessment after Asian Tsunami’ says: “Between the earthquake of 26 December 2004 and 24 January 2005, 25 sinkholes have been reported, an unprecedented frequency; 17 of them were reported in the six tsunami-affected provinces.”

But no such assessment has been done for India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

IPS approached several authorities, including the National Geophysical Research Institute, the National Institute of Ocean Technology, the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services, the Geological Society of India, but drew a blank.

The secretary of the Disaster Management Authority for Andaman and Nicobar Islands (DMA) was on leave and the director of DMA did not answer calls.

Sakshi Mittal, deputy commissioner of Nicobar, said, “This has not been brought to my notice yet.” Lt. Gen. A.K. Singh, Lieutenant-Governor of Andaman and Nicobar, the highest ranking official of the island territory, told IPS, “We have no idea about sinkholes, please complete your research and inform us.”

This administration seems unaware of potential dangers even though the area is home to 350,000 people, 20,000 of whom are highly endangered indigenous people. Its picturesque locales drew 250,445 tourists in 2013.

Ambikaprasad Mallik, a scuba diving instructor in Havelock Island, told IPS, “If a series of sinkholes on the beach collapses at one go, the difference of levels in the water and land masses can create waves and even cause a small local tsunami.”

Sinkholes occur in many parts of India and the world. They have accounted for the disappearance of human beings, livestock, rivers, buildings and vehicles.

“Sinkholes represent a hazard to property and human safety in a wide variety of geologic settings across the globe,” says the USGS on one of its websites.

Florida in the U.S. is particularly prone to sinkholes, with one last year swallowing a 37-year-old man in his sleep. Another engulfed a forest in Louisiana.

Geologists fight shy of forecasting the precise cause and consequence of sinkholes.

Prof. Kusala Rajendran of the Centre for Earth Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore told IPS, “It is unlikely to lead to anything life threatening, but there may be signatures of deformation such as fissures. This might depend on the region. During seismic activity, land can go down soon after the earthquake. Sinkholes form much later. They develop gradually and are well expressed.”

Bapat says, “The sinkholes recently formed in Andaman and Nicobar are probably due to the tsunami. Sometimes, due to geological formation and geometry in the coastal area, stationary waves are formed and this keeps the water vibrating in vertical direction.”

USGS notes: “Sinkholes are dramatic because the land usually stays intact for a period of time until the underground spaces just get too big. In most cases, the subsidence rate of a sinkhole represents the most significant potential impact and risk to public safety.”

Sinkholes on volcanic slopes like Krakatau in the Java Straits have triggered minor earthquakes. Barren Island, South Asia’s only active volcano located in the Andamans, has been spewing lava since January 2010.

With no public transport available to Barren Island, this writer’s request to the island administration to facilitate a photo shoot there and in other parts of Andaman district where mud volcanoes are expanding was not accepted.

In the Maldives, a nation of small islands threatened by rising sea levels, the topic of climate change is a controversial one. Credit: Nattu/CC by 2.0

By Ferry Biedermann
VENICE, Jun 5 2013 (IPS)

On the quay leading to the Arsenale exhibition complex, a block of ice melts in a rare blast of spring warmth. Elsewhere in the city, coconuts bob on the choppy waters of the canals during the opening week of the 55th Venice Biennale.

The ice and the coconuts were both works of art belonging to the Maldives in its first-ever participation in the Biennale. One, by Stefano Cagol, referenced melting ice sheets, which contribute to rising sea levels that may threaten the existence of the fragile island nation.

The second, by the Wooloo group, echoes a disaster that has already happened – the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, after which the sea was littered with bunches of coconuts.

The Maldives’ first national pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the world famous art show that attracts the rich, the famous and other art aficionados to this Italian lagoon city every two years, is all about climate change and the threat posed by rising sea levels to this low-lying chain of islands in the Indian Ocean.

This ecological focus, however, is also part of a Maldivian political controversy.

The pavilion was once the initiative of former president Mohamed Nasheed as a way to focus attention on the issue. It was almost abandoned after he resigned under hotly contested circumstances in February 2012.

The new government, with plenty of other issues demanding its attention, lost interest and allowed a joint Arab-European collective of curators, calling themselves Chamber of Public Secrets, to take over the pavilion and mount a show under the banner Portable Nation.

“They did not care. They did not mind. They don’t believe in the power of art to affect anything anyway,” Maren Richter, an Austrian associate curator, said of the current government’s attitude.

She called the lack of interest fortunate because political attitudes in the Maldives on the issue of climate change have changed dramatically.

“The new government even denies the problem and says that Nasheed was a liar. They say, ‘He built an airport and resorts, why would he do that if sea levels are rising?'” said Richter.

That accusation is voiced in the documentary “Maldives To Be or Not”, by Lebanese curator and artist Khaled Ramadan. It explores Western preconceived notions about the Maldives and its ecology, said Ramadan, who visited the islands as a citizen of the Arab world who wanted to learn about a place with shared identities.

Minimal action on climate change

T. C. Karthikheyan, an observer of the political and the ecological situation of the Maldives and an associate fellow at India’s National Maritime Foundation in New Delhi, confirmed that the current government is spreading the idea that Nasheed has been exaggerating the threat of rising sea levels.

The former president, who earned a degree in Maritime Studies in Liverpool before becoming a political activist, won elections in 2008, ending 30 years of authoritarian rule in the Muslim country. He immediately began making climate change a focus. In 2009, he famously held a cabinet session under water.

But Nasheed stepped down after widespread protests in February 2012, claiming that he had been forced out in a coup, an accusation that a Maldives inquiry called unfounded. He is now gearing up to run for reelection in September and win back the presidency from Mohammed Waheed Hassan.

The current government’s accusations against Nasheed can be interpreted as a attempt to discredit him while simultaneously sidestepping accusations that it has done too little on the issue of climate change since coming to power.

“They are mostly involved in politics and image building,” said Karthikheyan. “They have not done anything considerable in the previous year on the issue of climate change.”

Building awareness

In any case, the environment is not expected to play a major role in upcoming elections. Voters in the Maldives have other issues to worry about, such as the economy, democracy, human rights and the rise of Islamism, said Karthikheyan.

“The climate change aspect is not very prominent in the local campaign. When it comes to international attention then it is prominent,” he said.

The pavilion in Venice has helped the Maldives garner some of the attention that Nasheed sought for the issue of climate change, with many works there directly referencing the issue.

Outside the pavilion, an installation by Swiss artist Greg Niemeyer turns the various sea levels in the Maldives, Iceland, Venice and the Antarctic into sound.

Internet users in the Maldives can click a button on a website that will release the sound of a large tidal wave from the installation in Venice, a creation that is bound to attract notice in a city that itself is at risk from rising sea levels.

The 55th Venice Biennale was launched on 29 May and will be open to visitors until 24 November.

A Japanese flag standing amidst the rubble of the March 2011 tsunami. Credit: Daniel Pierce/CC-BY-2.0

By Marwaan Macan-Markar
MINAMISANRIKU, Japan, Mar 19 2013 (IPS)

As a survivor of Japan’s deadliest tsunami in living memory, Shun Ito dedicates his mornings to evoking stories of heroism that helped to save lives in this port town that was decimated on that fateful March afternoon two years ago.

Two names – Miki Endo and Takeshi Miura – frame the narrative that 37-year-old Ito shares with visitors as he guides them through this once quiet fishing resort, which still bears the scars of devastation left by the powerful waves on Mar. 11, 2011.

Among the few, gutted buildings still standing across empty stretches are the skeletal remains of the three-storey disaster-preparedness centre, where Endo and Miura served as radio operators.

They worked on the second floor and sent out messages through the town’s loudspeakers for people to get to higher ground as the tsunami approached, recalls Ito, who works as a receptionist at a hotel on the edge of this town.

“They remained at their job, giving warnings, even when it was known that the waves were higher than the building they were in.”

“They gave their lives to save others in this town,” adds Ito, standing in front of an impromptu memorial, complete with fresh flowers, which has come up near a blown-out wall of the centre. “We have to remember their sacrifice.”

Minamisanriku lost 1,206 of its 17,000 residents in March 2011, when 16-metre-high waves crashed over the town’s existing tsunami barriers barely 30 minutes after the powerful 9.0-magnitude earthquake ruptured the seabed some 130 kilometres from Japan’s Pacific coastline.

The death toll could have been higher, thousands more, had it not been for the work ethic of Endo, Miura and other members of Japan’s well-drilled disaster response management programme, spread across the 12 prefectures along the coast, who sounded the alarm to save lives.

And as Japan remembered the 15,880 people who were killed and the 2,694 people still missing after the twin terrors of the earthquake and tsunami, the role of the first responders, so pivotal in disaster preparedness efforts, was celebrated.

The ones who died or went missing during their call of duty, like Endo and Miura, include 254 firefighters and volunteer fire corps, 30 police officers and three members of the country’s self defence force, according to official records.

“People tend to forget, that is why such storytelling is important,” affirms Fumihiko Imamura, a senior academic at the International Research Institute of Disaster Science at Tohoku University. “These soft measures help to plan rebuilding and to protect people from the next tsunami.”

Such stories are being added to the graphic video footage of the raging waves crashing through towns as they surged many kilometres inland.

“The video material and other records in the media offer a more comprehensive picture to remember what happened,” Imamura said in an exclusive interview with IPS. “So when communities in the Tohoku region design buildings and plan escape routes, (information about) the height of the waves and how far inland they came will shape their decisions.”

In fact, the practice of stitching together a tapestry of memories and storytelling by members of the devastated communities taps into a Japanese tradition of “handing down memories” that goes back centuries.

The coastal region of this earthquake-prone and tsunami-hit country bears out these narratives in the form of carved warnings on stone tablets.

The memorial stones and rocks, some nearly three metres tall, have clear messages, such as: “If an earthquake comes, beware of tsunamis”, or another, which says, “Do not build your homes below this point”.

The more legible tablets that dot the coast were erected in the wake of the 1896 tsunami that killed 22,000 people, the worst in over a century until the 2011 disaster struck. A tsunami in 1707 killed 30,000 people.

Hundreds of these warnings from the past, some 600 years old, are viewed in this corner of Japan as a glimpse into a world that placed a premium on knowledge sharing in order to survive regular battering from the sea.

But some residents honour the warnings of old as proof that previous victims of deadly tsunamis did not die in vain and that their wisdom ensures successive generations live in safer areas.

This culture of keeping collective memory alive has taken other forms further inland, such as in the southern city of Kobe, which was hit by a devastating earthquake in January 1995 that killed 6,434 people.

There, an earthquake museum has emerged as the centerpiece of efforts to keep alive the memory of the temblor that struck at dawn.

The 500,000 visitors who walk through its halls every year are not only offered visual presentations of what happened, but they also get to hear real accounts from 40 survivors who are part of the museum’s 160 volunteer staff.

“This is a very effective way for the visitors to feel what happened,” admits Masahiko Murata, director of the Kobe-based Disaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institute. “It is direct, human to human.”

Lessons from past disasters have also begun filling the pages of textbooks being distributed throughout Japan’s school system, adding a new layer to the country’s laudable efforts to reduce the impact of disasters.

“Disaster management manuals for schools are important to prepare future generations,” Murata told IPS. “We need to always keep transferring lessons to the next generations who have not experienced disasters and need to know what to do when caught in one.”

For Ito, one of those lessons is obvious. Minamisanriku’s new disaster preparedness centre should be a taller building and in a safer location to protect future radio operators. “We should do that for the sake of the two radio operators who died in 2011,” he says. “Mr. Miura was my friend. We coached the sports teams at the local school together.”

(END)

Yukiko Takada. Credit: Suvendrini Kakuchi/IPS.

By Suvendrini Kakuchi
TOKYO, Mar 10 2013 (IPS)

Japan prepares to mark the second anniversary of the Mar. 11 triple disaster – an earthquake, tsunami and a critical nuclear reactor accident – with much soul searching across the country.

For Yukiko Takada from Otsuki-cho, a scenic fishing town in Iwate prefecture that was turned into rubble in a few hours on that fateful day, the upcoming memorial Monday will simply be another day.

“For me, as it is like for the survivors who experienced the horrible tragedy, everyday remains a memorial, not just March 11, as we struggle to accept what happened and to get our lives back after the devastation,” she tells IPS.

The young woman represents one of the more poignant stories in lessons learnt following the disaster. Takada launched her own community newspaper last June. It was a project, she says, that was imperative to the recovery of the local community.

Otsuchi Shimbun, published weekly, provides up to date information on issues such as relocation of families, temporary housing, employment opportunities and local government decisions. It plays a crucial role in the rebuilding of people’s confidence.

Supported mainly with revenue from local ads, the newspaper, a one-woman show, carries diverse voices, and includes a focus on women. Takada says women have displayed mind-boggling will power to restart their lives for the sake of their families.

Takada is planning a daily version of the paper later this year.

“The lack of correct information for disaster-struck people left them vulnerable and scared, and this problem needed to be addressed desperately as people sought to rebuild their lives,” she says. “Mainstream media outlets could not fulfill this role because they were busy filing stories aimed at readers outside our area.”

Reiko Masai, head of Kobe Net, a pioneering women’s organisation tackling disaster and gender issues that was established after the devastating Hanshin earthquake that hit Kobe city in western Japan in 1995, says that “two years after the disaster, despite national funds being poured into recovery, confusion and despair remain huge problems in the daily lives of the people. Takada has proved that women can be key to overcoming this struggle.”

Disasters are common in earthquake-prone Japan. It also leads with state-of-the art disaster prevention. But the 9.0 magnitude earthquake two years back that led to a 10-metre high tsunami has left the country still facing enormous challenges.

Almost 20,000 people died that day, a figure that shocked Japan given its national policies supporting regular earthquake drills, earthquake forecast technology and a range of safety precautions.

Currently about 160,000 people are still living in temporary housing with no hope of returning especially to areas hit by radiation contamination from the damaged Fukushima nuclear reactor.

Takada recalls how she barely escaped the tsunami. “I was in the neighbouring city when the quake hit. I quickly jumped into my car to return home. As I was driving, the road began to disappear in front me – it filled up with seawater from the tsunami. I abandoned the car and ran up a hill to save my life.”

Otsuki-cho, a bustling town of 16,000 people well known for its supply of fresh oysters, abalone and seaweed to the city markets remains a barren town today. It faces a population crunch as people either move out or into temporary housing.

Women face higher risks. Statistics after the Kobe earthquake indicate that the number of deaths of females between 70 and 90 years of age was more than double that of men in the same age group, mainly because women live longer and alone.

Stress and trauma also affect women more, given their childcare responsibilities. The Fukushima Women’s Network has noted high levels of anxiety among mothers of relocated families.

Gender has become an important concern in mainstream policy making now thanks to women’s groups that have lobbied hard the past two years.

The gender equality bureau in the Cabinet Office released new gender-based guidelines in disaster planning last year. These include provisions for women-friendly shelters, protecting women from sexual harassment, and employment information for women.

“There is no doubt that women’s concerns are slowly entering mainstream policy,” says Masai. “But there is still much work to be done, especially when it comes to getting women into leadership roles in disaster prevention and post-disaster planning. That is our next step.”

The reconstruction of the fishing village of Boyeruca, destroyed by the tsunami that swept over central-south Chile on Feb. 27, 2010, was meant to serve as a model of ecological and sustainable reconstruction.

But progress has been hindered by bureaucracy and disorganisation, and three years later, a vulnerable community continues waiting to rebuild their lives.

Boyeruca is a village in the “comuna” (county) of Vichuquén, 293 kilometres south of Santiago on Chile’s Pacific Ocean coast. Its 300 residents have always earned their livelihoods from the sea.

The 8.8 magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami, which caused severe damages and losses for millions of people along a 600-kilometre strip of the Chilean coast, destroyed 80 percent of the homes in Boyeruca.

According to eye-witness accounts, the sea “rose up three times.” The first tsunami wave resulted in only minor damages, but the second destroyed practically everything in its path.

The fishing village of Boyeruca after the tsunami. Credit: Courtesy of IEP

To deal with the damages, an alliance of civil society organisations, private companies, environmental organisations and religious groups, coordinated by the Institute of Political Ecology (IEP), joined forces in a campaign for the sustainable reconstruction of the village.

“After our first visit to Boyeruca, we observed such a lack of everything that we decided to launch a campaign to contribute to reconstruction,” IEP communications coordinator Claudia Lisboa told Tierramérica*.

The joint initiative was aimed at the creation of an “eco-village” powered by renewable energy sources to promote local productive development.

Barrick Gold Corporation, a Canadian mining company, took charge of rebuilding the local school, which was relocated to the hills of Boyeruca to protect it in the event of another earthquake and tsunami in the future.

For its part, the collective redesigned the school library with an environmental theme, through donations of books and publications on environmental issues and the installation of pine wood furniture.

“With the help of a group of students from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, we rebuilt an ‘eco-classroom’, and a group of Chileans and other Latin Americans in Nuremburg, Germany helped us restock the library. We also conducted a study for the creation of an eco-friendly school garden, which is still pending,” said Lisboa.

Another group, led by psychologist Carmen Colomer, has provided integral mental health care and counselling for children and older adults.

“We have held workshops at the school, in the form of ‘story time’, and have provided support for the organisation of the library, the design of small-scale production projects, and the creation of a community fund, based on the experience of the ‘banks for the poor’,” said Colomer, referring to the Grameen Bank microcredit scheme founded in Bangladesh.

Hortensia Guerrero, a member of the Libertad fisherpeople’s union of Boyeruca, told Tierramérica that the non-governmental organisations provided “real” assistance that was extremely helpful to the community at the time.

But due to the sluggish bureaucracy of municipal and national authorities, “today people are living worse than before,” she said.

In 2010, local families were moved to higher ground, far from the coastline where their homes had been demolished. But they have returned to this “danger zone” where they now live in precarious housing, haunted by the ghosts of the peaceful life they once led.

In early 2012, the authorities promised that they would build decent housing on high ground, but this has yet to happen, reported Guerrero. “People are living without drinking water and without electricity.”

Before the tsunami, the village’s main attraction was an estuarine lagoon where Pacific oysters (Crassostrea gigas) were raised.

“The oyster nursery was what attracted tourists to Boyeruca. But the tsunami washed sand into the lagoon, so that where the water used to be four metres deep, it’s now only half a metre or 20 centimetres deep,” said Guerrero.

The lagoon was also rich in bird life, including black-necked swans, red-gartered coots and various species of wild duck, which are no longer found here.

Local residents formerly used the salt flats of Boyeruca to process table salt as well. But this source of livelihood was also lost after the tsunami.

“There used to be a precious wetland, with a stream where we used to get water. But an unscrupulous individual went in with heavy machinery and diverted the stream, destroying the wetland, which used to stretch almost a kilometre,” said Guerrero.

At press time the Chilean authorities had still not released official figures on housing reconstruction three years after the earthquake. But government spokespeople have reported that 85 percent of overall reconstruction has been completed, and that 75 percent of the new homes needed have either been delivered or are currently under construction.

President Sebastián Piñera pledged that reconstruction would be complete by the end of his term, in March 2014. This would imply the repair of 110,000 homes and the construction of 112,000 new homes, according to the Ministry of Housing.

For Tusy Urra, coordinator of the National Movement for Just Reconstruction, the real situation does not match up with official figures.

“Many of the victims lost everything but have not even been able to submit the documentation to apply for a subsidy,” she stated.

In addition, “the process has been very slow, and many families continue to suffer the indignity of living in ‘mediaguas’ (prefabricated wood shelters without bathrooms) or with relatives or friends,” Urra told Tierramérica. “There is no plan with policies aimed at sustainability.”

Reconstruction has been targeted to meeting “immediate” needs, and because of this, “the government has missed out on a great opportunity,” she added.

“The ideal approach would have been housing construction policies adapted to the new times and the needs of neighbourhoods, preserving their history, their heritage, incorporating new technologies and sustainability. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened,” she concluded.

*This article was originally published by the Latin American network of newspapers Tierramérica.

Japanese university students survey the tsunami devastation in Minamisanriku before getting to work. Credit: Daan Bauwens/IPS.

By Daan Bauwens
TOKYO, Feb 4 2013 (IPS)

Funding for reconstruction is beginning to decline after the tsunami almost two years ago – but in large parts of Japan’s north-eastern region reconstruction has yet to begin. More and more young Japanese are now moving into this area for reconstruction in a new way.

It is six in the morning. A bus arrives on the barren plane that used to be the coastal town of Minamisanriku. Except for two metal frames of what once were large buildings, there is no sign of human presence.

Twenty students from Tokyo step out of the bus and visit the grounds. An hour later they join another group of volunteers and start digging the frozen ground to clear away debris the giant mud wave washed up two years ago.

Among them is Akinori Fujisawa, vice-president of the project University of Tokyo  Aid (UT Aid) that gathers students from all over Japan to volunteer in the stricken areas on weekends.

“Just after the tsunami,” he tells IPS, “all Japanese wanted to come here and volunteer. But many couldn’t. Students had the time but not the money to get here while employed people had the money but no time. That’s how we started: we got funding from individuals and companies and started organising these weekend trips.”

It’s not just students. “We come here every weekend with friends,” says Machiko Ogata, a young Japanese woman in her thirties. “We meet up in Tokyo and drive here together. We all met on one of these sites. It is a social happening.”

But initiatives like this are likely to die out soon. “There will be no more need for people shoveling and digging,” Akinori Fujisawa tells IPS. “We would like to start new projects, like trying to improve studying conditions for children in the area. At the moment most of them are doing homework on the streets. But we can’t do anything about it with the current budget.

“What’s more, it’s getting more and more difficult to gather funds,” Akinori adds. “People mistakenly think the reconstruction is over. You can clearly see that’s not the case. But there’s not a lot we can do about it, in two months our organisation will be put to a permanent stop.”

While grassroots projects as UT Aid are moving out of the area, an increasingly professionalised group of young NGO and social business leaders is moving in.

Entrepreneurial Training for Innovative Communities (ETIC) in Tokyo is a training centre for young entrepreneurs who want to start a social business. Since the tsunami, the organisation has started a fellowship programme that trains and sends young entrepreneurs into the region to help in rebuilding.

“We already sent more than 135 people into the region,” says Yoshi Koumei Ishikawa, ETIC’s research division manager. “Most of them are in their twenties and thirties and almost all quit their jobs at Japan’s biggest firms to start their own social project.”

At the same time, leaders of successful Japanese NGOs choose to relocate to Tohoku, a devastated region. Katariba, an NGO led by Kumi Imamura (33) has already set up three schools for more than 300 children to compensate for the lack of study space at the temporary homes of tsunami victims.

“But most importantly, local residents are employed as teachers and will soon take over the organisation of the programme,” says Retz Fujisawa (37), coordinator of almost all NGOs working in the area. “The first phase of relief is over,” he tells IPS. “Now our intention is to stimulate self-reconstruction, the Tohoku residents must assume leadership now.”

With the Tokyo-based Tohoku Earthquake Consulting Team, Fujisawa is guiding reconstruction efforts by NGOs. He is also member of the government’s Reconstruction Agency and Educational Reconstruction Council, where he defends a brand new reconstruction policy.

“The Tohoku region is devastated, the damage was enormous,” he tells IPS. “But even without a tsunami the region was heading towards a catastrophe. It was suffering from a very bad economic situation, especially caused by an aging society and the emigration of all young people to Tokyo. If we now are to rebuild the region, we must grab this chance to rebuild it in a way that it won’t happen again, and do everything we can to create a new style of living.”

Retz Fujisawa describes Tohoku as a test case for the rest of Asia. “We are suffering from the fact that all resources, capital and education are concentrated in large cities. In the meantime the rest of the country is being forgotten. We now have the chance to reorganise a whole region and to distribute resources.”

According to Fujisawa, Tohoku is not just a test case but also the perfect example that his country is rapidly changing. “This is the first time an NGO leader is invited to work for the government,” he tells IPS. “It is the first time that policy ideas originate from young people down below the decision chain.

“There are as many female as male project leaders in Tohoku. Most are in their twenties and thirties and quit their jobs to come here. There’s one main reason for this: we are all connected by social media, information is being shared and no longer withheld. Young people can start acting on their own. This never happened before in Japan.”

Japan’s crippled nuclear power plant is struggling to find space to store tens of thousands of tonnes of highly contaminated water used to cool the broken reactors, the manager of the water treatment team has said.

About 200,000 tonnes of radioactive water, enough to fill more than 50 Olympic-sized swimming pools, are being stored in hundreds of gigantic tanks built around the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

Operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has already chopped down trees to make room for more tanks and predicts the volume of water will be more than tripled within three years.

“It’s a time-pressing issue because the storage of contaminated water has its limits, there is only limited storage space,” the water-treatment manager, Yuichi Okamura, told the AP news agency in an exclusive interview this week.

The Yotukura fishing village was one of the areas devastated by the Mar. 11, 2011 tsunami that caused the nuclear plant meltdown. Credit: Suvendrini Kakuchi/IPS

Dumping massive amounts of water into the melting reactors was the only way to avoid an even bigger catastrophe after the meltdown at TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power reactor, caused by the Mar. 11, 2011 tsunami.

Okamura remembers frantically trying to find a way to get water to spent fuel pools located on the highest floor of the 50m high reactor buildings.

Without water, the spent fuel likely would have overheated and melted, sending radioactive smoke for miles and affecting possibly millions of people.

But the measures to keep the plant under control created another huge headache for the utility: What to do with all the radioactive water that leaked out of the damaged reactors and collected in the basements of reactor buildings and nearby facilities.

“At that time, we never expected high-level contaminated water to turn up in the turbine building,” Okamura said.

He was tasked with setting up a treatment system that would make the water clean enough for reuse as a coolant, and was also aimed at reducing health risks for workers and at curbing environmental damage.

At first, the utility shunted the tainted water into existing storage tanks near the reactors.

Contaminated water

Meanwhile, Okamura’s 55-member team scrambled to get a treatment unit up and running within three months of the accident, a project that would normally take about two years, he said.

Using that equipment, TEPCO was able to circulate reprocessed water back into the reactor cores.

But even though the reactors now are being cooled exclusively with recycled water, the volume of contaminated water is still increasing, mostly because groundwater is seeping through cracks into the reactor and turbine basements.

Next month, Okamura’s group plans to flip the switch on new purifying equipment using Toshiba Corp. technology.

“By purifying the water using the ALPS system, theoretically, all radioactive products can be purified to below detection levels,” he said.

But in the meantime its tanks are filling up, mostly because leaks in reactor facilities are allowing groundwater to pour in.

Masashi Goto, a nuclear engineer and university lecturer, said the contaminated water build-up posed a major long-term threat to health and the environment.

He said he was worried that the radioactive water in the basements may already be getting into the underground water system, where it could reach far beyond the plant via underground water channels, possibly reaching the ocean or public water supplies.

“There are pools of some 10,000 or 20,000 tonnes of contaminated water in each plant, and there are many of these, and to bring all of these to one place would mean you would have to treat hundreds of thousands of tonnes of contaminated water which is mind-blowing in itself,” Goto said.

“It’s an outrageous amount, truly outrageous,” Goto added.

The plant will have to deal with contaminated water until all the melted fuel and other debris is removed from the reactor, a process that will easily take more than a decade.

* Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

By Suvendrini Kakuchi
TOKYO, Sep 2 2012 (IPS)

Yumiko Yonekura, who survived last year’s massive earthquake and tsunami that devastated Tohoku in northeast Japan, has just launched ‘Hot Care Kesenuma’, a welfare company that provides special care for feeble elders in the affected region.

“The idea of starting my own company that deals with care giving emerged when I was in the evacuation centre after the disaster. People were helping each other to survive and this encouraged me to contribute to the devastated community,” she told IPS.

Yonekura, 52, lives in Kesenuma that recorded 1,300 dead or missing following the Mar. 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami when waves as high as 30 metres crashed into the picturesque towns and villages that dot the coast of Miyagi prefecture, about  200 km northeast of Tokyo.

Miyagi along with Iwate, Fukushima, Akita, Aomori and Yamagata form the Tohoku region that was worst affected by the tsunami and the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant that followed.

Even before the disaster Tohoku had a depressed economy that caused the steady migration of its young and better educated population to the cities, leaving behind men and women well past their prime to struggle with family-run farming and fishing.

It took exceptional courage for Yonekura to start her company and win respect as a woman who could make a mark in disaster recovery in Tohoku, a backward and  tradition-bound region where the average age is 65 years.

Yuko Kusano, of the Sendai-based Jo-Net that supports female survivors, says Yonekura has proved that disasters can catalyse change in women – even if they have lived a major part of their lives in the patriarchal culture of Tohoku.

“The loss of family members, jobs and homes forced women in Tohoku to rethink traditional roles that expected them to be supportive wives and mothers,” said Kusano who assisted Yonekura at the beginning.

Achieving income sustainability and security are a major concern among gender experts who support the idea of female disaster survivors searching for financial independence.

Experts point out that most jobs available for women who no longer work in family farms or fishing are part-time, such as in reconstruction projects or as office workers in local companies that are cutting costs.

Women’s groups report that younger females, faced with a lack of jobs in their damaged towns, are forced to leave for the big cities where they end up in the sex industry.

“Long-term stability in a post-disaster society can be achieved only by planning carefully. Education, skill building and, most importantly, providing space for women to learn through discussions that they can do it, is the way to achieve gender-led recovery,” says Hiromi Narita, a gender expert.

Narita who leads seminars in computers and business skills at a single mothers forum, a section of the Miyagi local government said, “We have seen an increasing number of single women from the disaster areas joining our classes with the intention of finding new jobs or securing the ones they already hold down.”

While jobs for women have taken priority in disaster recovery, there is a need to provide emotional support since a large number of survivors are suffering from depression and anxiety.

Medical records filed from the Tohoku area indicate an increase in heart disease, hypertension and depression linked to inability to adjust to drastically altered lives in cramped and lonely evacuation centres.

The health and welfare ministry reported in April that the longevity of Japanese women, once ranked a high 85.90 years, has dropped by 0.04 years following the disaster. Females comprise half of the 345,000 people listed as displaced.

Rei Yamaya, who is a counsellor at the Morioka Women’s Centre, explains that her work with many of the women has revealed that trauma lingers but is ignored by authorities as a key concern in gender-based disaster recovery.

“In Tohoku’s conservative society, women rarely speak of depression or reach out for help for fear of appearing as bad wives or incompetent mothers. Reaching out to these survivors must, therefore, be sensitive to local cultural constraints,” she said.

Yamaya’s group has started cafés for women as a space where they can talk without fear of discrimination. “By eating tasty food along with their children, they break through their silent suffering,” she said.

The centre is supported by international funding, seen as an illustration of the lack of official support for trauma support programmes, other than tax concessions and other incentives to attract investment in Tohoku.

Yonekura agrees. Apart from providing health services to the elderly, she also plans to extend her work to provide emotional support, given the urgent needs in her community.

“I had to work hard to even convince my husband to allow me to start my own company. I can sympathise with female disaster survivors,” she said.

Says Kusano: “Basically, the women are starting from scratch, knowing that there is no returning to their former lives. We have to work together to learn to accept that a disaster can result in change for the better – learning new skills is the easy part.”

Two years after the earthquake and tsunami in south-central Chile, the worst natural disaster to hit the country in half a century, thousands of families who saw their homes destroyed are still waiting for a solution.

The earthquake measured 8.8 degrees on the Richter scale and lasted almost three full minutes, and was followed by a devastating tsunami. At least 520 people died and close to a million were affected, according to official figures.

Two years later, this house in the coastal town of Iloca still bears witness to the devastating force of the tsunami. Credit: Marianela Jarroud/IPS

In the early morning hours of Feb. 27, 2010, Rosa Núñez, 75, found herself unable to sleep. Nuñéz lives in Iloca, a small tourist town on the Pacific Ocean coast, 300 km south of Santiago. For many years she ran a little restaurant in a house that was washed away by the sea.

Thanks to her insomnia, Nuñez was awake when the earthquake began and ran out of the house, enduring the tremor outdoors. Her home was roughly 100 metres from the coast, and 30 metres from a tree-covered hill where she took refuge along with her oldest son’s family.

A single classroom in the primary school in Iloca survived the worst natural disaster in Chile in 50 years. Credit: Marianela Jarroud/IPS

Once she was safely up on high ground, she turned her back on the ocean so she would not have to witness the destruction. “I will never forget the sound of the sea destroying everything, washing away everything we had built with so much hard work,” she recalls today.

Two hours later, when she returned with her son, she saw that “the sea took everything away… there were no walls, the sea had swallowed up everything,” Núñez told Tierramérica.

Today she lives in a small, solidly built house that she already owned, across from the house she lost, and that she was able to repair with assistance. Her oldest son lives next door, in a small home he constructed from half of a mediagua (a prefabricated wooden house without a bathroom, meant to serve as temporary housing) that someone donated.

Her youngest son, a fisherman, lives in a wooden cabin with a bathroom in a small housing complex donated by a foreigner. Behind it he is building a more solid, permanent home. Now that her restaurant is gone, Núñez depends on the financial support of her children.

The landscape around Iloca, in the central Chilean region of Maule, has yet to recover its tranquil beauty. The coastline is dotted with ruins. What were once luxurious summer vacation homes still look out over the sea, but are now irreparably damaged.

Just a few metres away, fishermen and rural workers live in camps made up of mediaguas.

According to official figures, 76,000 homes have been repaired or rebuilt in the six regions affected – Bío-Bío, La Araucanía, Maule, O’Higgins, Santiago and Valparaíso – while work is currently underway on another 140,000.

But these figures are disputed by the victims of the disaster, who complain of the slow pace of reconstruction.

Lorena Arce, spokesperson for the victims in the seaside tourist town of Dichato, in the southern region of Bío-Bío, maintains that only 10 percent of the homes destroyed there have been rebuilt, and these belong to low-income families living in camps or temporary settlements the government refers to as “villages”.

The other 90 percent of the families left homeless are middle-class, and many of them are not considered eligible for the government reconstruction program.

Senator Ximena Rincón, of the opposition Christian Democratic Party, told Tierramérica that “the government has fixed the numbers to be able to measure greater progress by mixing reconstruction subsidies with ordinary subsidies.” This results in a lack of transparency that makes it impossible to determine the real progress made, she stressed.

President Sebastián Piñera pledged that his government would repair 110,000 homes and build 112,000 new homes by the end of his term in March 2014. This promise will not be kept, predicts Rincón, a senator for the region of Maule.

“There is going to be a great deal of frustration among the citizens over these broken promises,” she warned.

While touring the six regions affected on Feb. 21-27, Piñera reiterated his pledge that “no family will spend more than two winters living in villages that were created as temporary emergency solutions.” However, he admitted that it will not be possible to achieve this goal by the time the next Southern hemisphere winter begins.

In the meantime, Chilean television stations are broadcasting a government publicity campaign that cost 805,000 dollars about the progress made in reconstruction.

The area affected encompasses a strip that stretches 600 km in length.

Nuñéz and most of the other residents of Iloca and the surrounding area say that they have not seen any government contribution to local reconstruction efforts. They have done what they can to get back on their feet by dipping into their own savings and through private donations of mediaguas and building supplies for the neediest.

The waves damaged homes in the foothills more than 100 metres from the coast, such as this house in La Pesca, 5 km south of Iloca. Credit: Marianela Jarroud/IPS

Specialists believe that the problem lies in the model for reconstruction, based on the promotion of housing construction through the allocation of subsidies to construction companies.

If the companies deem that the government subsidies fall below the price they would normally charge for the housing constructed, they are simply not interested in such an unprofitable undertaking, and there is nothing the government can do about it.

In addition to the delays, says Lorena Arce, the companies are building homes of lesser quality to compensate for the perceived loss of profitability.

Chile has construction standards to ensure that new buildings are earthquake-proof, but not to ensure that they can withstand a tsunami. This means that the location of new buildings and their proximity to the coast are crucial considerations. Arce reports that properties along the coastline are being expropriated, but, at the same time, large tourism resort-style buildings are being constructed in these same areas.

But she has not given up hope.

“We hope that the government will work conscientiously, that it will recognise that a great deal more construction is needed and that it will provide more resources, because they are needed: reconstruction cannot be done with cardboard. We hope they will show greater will, and adopt state policies that will continue over into the new government that will take office in 2014,” she told Tierramérica.

There are no official figures on damaged or destroyed schools, but many have been replaced with prefabricated modular classrooms, such as those now being used in Iloca, thanks to private donations.

Secondary school students, who in 2011 played a key role in the biggest social protest movement seen in Chile in the 20 years since the return of democracy, are planning demonstrations to protest the slow pace of the reconstruction of schools, while civil society organisations are planning a national public survey on the progress of reconstruction.

*The writer is an IPS correspondent. This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.