Early warning system saved thousands

IN THE days and hours before the devastating cyclone that tore through Bangladesh’s coast last week, the performance of the early warning programme was a rare bright spot in a saga of catastrophe, disaster management officials said yesterday.

In Bangladesh, where many government programmes are inefficient at best, a system that used hi-tech weather tracking satellites at one end and volunteers carrying bullhorns at the other operated impressively well.

More than one million people fled to shelters after hearing the warnings from radio, television and volunteers who rode motorbikes down potholed roads to alert villagers, according to Ian Rector, the United Nations chief technical adviser for Bangladesh’s disaster programme.

“The lives of tens or hundreds of thousands were saved because of the early warning and the mobilisation,” said Mr Rector.

“They did a fantastic job.”

Tropical Cyclone Sidr killed more than 3,100 people and left hundreds of thousands homeless.

But the death toll was a fraction of earlier storms, such as the 1970 cyclone that killed between 300,000 and 500,000 people, or the 1991 storm that killed 140,000.

Maryam Golnaraghi, head of the World Meteorological Organization’s disaster risk reduction programme, said if not for the warning system, the death toll from Sidr might have been on a par with the Asian tsunami of 2004 which killed more than 230,000 people in a dozen countries.

The Bangladesh Meteorological Department sent the first evacuation order 27 hours before the storm’s landfall.

Then, the Cyclone Preparedness Centre, a joint venture between the Bangladesh government and the Red Crescent Society, told its more than 42,000 volunteers across the country to warn villagers to head to shelters.