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29 Mar 2006

'Disaster proof' schools to save lives, says U.N.

By Emma Batha

Kashmiri earthquake survivors attend a school in the mountain village of Narda Jian, some 60 km (37 miles) northeast of the earthquake-devastated city of Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

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Kashmiri earthquake survivors attend a school in the mountain village of Narda Jian, some 60 km (37 miles) northeast of the earthquake-devastated city of Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton

BONN (AlertNet) - The United Nations is launching a campaign to “disaster proof” schools to reduce the numbers of children crushed to death in earthquakes or washed away in floods.

Some 18,000 children died in the Pakistan quake in October when their schools collapsed on top of them – roughly a quarter of the total death toll. Reinforcing the buildings would have cost as little as a dollar a child, one aid agency said last year.

The new campaign by the United Nations’ International Strategy for Disaster Reduction will also push governments to make lessons on natural hazards and how to reduce the risk of death and injury part of the school curriculum.

“The children are the … decision makers of the future. If you want to make a safer world I think you have to target children,” ISDR spokeswoman Brigitte Leone said in a meeting at the Third International Early Warning Conference in Bonn.

“We have two main objectives: to make schools safer and to get disaster reduction into the curriculum in primary and secondary schools.”

ISDR consultant and hazards expert Ben Wisner said there were an estimated 34 million children living in the 20 countries that registered the most deadly earthquakes during the 20th century.

The campaign will launch in June in Paris.

Aid agency ActionAid is also launching a project to make schools safer and introduce disaster risk reduction into the curriculum. The programme will initially focus on Nepal, India, Malawi, Ghana, Kenya, Haiti and Bangladesh.

SUCCESS STORY

Bangladesh is often cited as an example of how inexpensive grass roots initiatives can save lives.

Bangladesh’s disaster management minister, Chowdhury Kamal Ibne Yusuf, said all schools built since 2004 had been designed to double up as flood shelters. New schools are built from reinforced concrete and elevated from the ground.

The country is also running a massive public awareness programme on risk reduction with a strong focus on reaching children through the classroom, he said.

The minister contrasted the cyclone that hit Bangladesh in 1991 with one that struck Los Angeles the following year. Some 138,000 people were killed in a single night in Bangladesh; just 18 died in Los Angeles.

He said that without the resources of a developed country Bangladesh had to exploit low-tech solutions.

“We now have around 3,000 cyclone shelters in coastal areas and off shore islands and around 30,000 trained volunteers,” he told AlertNet.

The number of deaths in recent cyclones has fallen to 200 to 300, he said.

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