Story description

Issue focus story: A World Awash — The pandemic of floods

ITT Flygt, a world leader in submersible pumps and mixers based in Stockholm, Sweden, commissioned this article on the global flooding pandemic. As in other similar assignments for corporations, I am to write a journalistically credible article without any mention or refernce to the company itself. As such, it is one of my favorite types of assignments in corporate journalism because I am free to look for my own sources and let the article develop in the way I think the target readership will most benefit from it.

Published in Impeller, a news magazine from ITT Flygt, No. 62: 2003. Impeller is published three times per year in eight languages and 60,000 copies. The magazine covers the latest developments in the water management industry and highlights new technologies and environmental issues.

Publisher:
Appelberg Publishing Agency

Duelling the deluge

By Jack Jackson

Floods are a fact of nature, but in recent years floods have taken increasingly heavy tolls both economically and in terms of human lives and suffering. Now experts are trying to determine why this is happening and how to decrease our vulnerability.

When the annual floods wash through Bangladesh’s rural communities along the country’s 250 rivers, the locals celebrate. Like other river-based societies around the world, these Bangladeshis have learned to live with and benefit from nature’s annual ebb and flow. Soil for crops is replenished with nutrients from the high water, which also attracts spawning freshwater fish – a major Bangladeshi food source.

Too much of a good thing is, however, most unwelcome, as Bangladeshis know all too well. Large and lethal floods in the past 15 years seemed to be trying to outdo each other for damage done. In 1988, a devastating flood left two-thirds of the country under water. Three years later, a cyclone caused six-metre waves to flood onto land, killing 140,000 people and causing almost 1 billion US dollars in damage. In 1998, heavy rainfall mixed with an untimely rise in sea level displaced more than 10 million people, ravaging the country’s infrastructure and economy. And in the past 2002 summer, more region-wide flooding killed hundreds and displaced millions in Bangladesh, as well as in neighbouring India and Nepal.

“Nowhere in the world are floods so frequent and so destructive as in Bangladesh, in terms of material losses and loss of life,” says Zbigniew Kundzewicz, a professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Poznan and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and contributor to the 2001 policy report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Hazardous flooding. But Bangladesh is not alone in dealing with major flood problems. In recent years, floods have submerged millions of people and billions of dollars worth of property in a list of countries that reads like a United Nations: China, Russia, Mozambique/southern Africa, Venezuela, the United States, the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Italy, Germany… and on and on and on. While nature’s floods are nothing new, the havoc they wreak becomes greater with every year. Which is why there is new urgency to understand why this is happening and what we can do to decrease human vulnerability to flood hazards.

A flood occurs during a time of high water during which water overflows its natural or artificial banks onto normally dry land. Anyone who lives just down river from a mountain range with a good winter snow pack can testify to the power of sudden, warm spring weather. Other causes can be a heavy downpour of rain upstream, which can trigger flash floods. Persistent wet meteorological patterns over a large region – as happened in the upper Mississippi River basin in the US in 1993 – bring flood conditions downstream that can last for months. Rivers can also jam with ice or mud, spilling out of their banks, and the failure of man-made dams and levees can send a wall of water to create potentially vast destruction, as happened in the summer of 2002 in Syria. Flooding from storm surges is the cause of more deaths than any other factor during a hurricane, according to the US National Hurricane Center.

Floods can destroy infrastructure – bridges, roads, railroads – and wash out homes and businesses. In addition to deaths by drowning, floodwaters carry infections that cause diarrhoea and epidemics. The July 1997 flood on the Odra River killed 114 in the Czech Republic and Poland, caused immense economic losses of as much as USD 6 billion in these countries and Germany, and showed all three countries just how unprepared they were for such a catastrophe. The costs for the even worse floods of 2002 in Germany and the Czech Republic are estimated to total more than 20 billion USD. The upside, says Kundzewicz, was a reminder of just how vulnerable we humans are to the natural course of the earth – and how far we have strayed from that way of thinking.

“The history of floods and humans interacting with them has been abundant in books and chronicles since the advent of civilisation,” says Kundzewicz. “For millennia, people have lived in harmony with floods. But now things are changing.” Population growth is one major factor.

“There are now more than 6 billion people living on this planet, and an increasing number of them are living in flood plains – especially in developing countries,” he says, naming the Bagmati River in Kathmandu as one example. Shantytowns sprout up on the outskirts of nearly any big city that is by a river in poor countries, he says. “These areas attract them because they are empty of other people. But of course they are empty – they are flood plains.”

Shantytown dwellers are not the only people feeling the stronger effects of flooding, however. Hydrologist Ignacio Rodríguez-Iturbe, professor of hydrology at Princeton University in the United States and recipient of the 2002 Stockholm Water Prize, points out that a cause-and-effect relationship has been established between global warming and the frequency and magnitude of floods and drought extremes. Add to that the new realisation that traditional methods have been incorrect for determining a river’s flood-return rate.
“We have come to realise in the past decade that floods and droughts tend to be more frequent than what was previously expected,” Rodríguez-Iturbe says. “If you hear an urban planner say, ‘This river floods once in every lifetime,’ well, that’s a bunch of baloney. These previous estimations tend to be grossly underestimated.”

Traditional structural means for coping with floods can be questionable and expensive, says Rodríguez-Iturbe. “Until not very long ago, there was a general sense that we could control a river through dikes and levees and dams. These are some ways. But let’s not work on false pretension that these will protect us completely,” he says.

Kundzewicz adds that major levees and dikes, while they are a serious flood protection option, are usually designed for a 100-year flood. “There’s no guarantee the structure will hold if a 500-year or 1,000-year flood comes,” he says.

Benefits of flood protection reservoirs are rarely viewed as a serious option anymore for their impact on sustainable development and human resettlement. Benefits must clearly outweigh the ruin of a river’s natural regime and the relocation of people. China’s massive new Xiaolangdi Dam project on the Yellow River is intended to control floods, but requires the relocation of 180,000 people. On the other hand, the dam is intended to protect 103 million people downstream, provide irrigation for 2 million hectares and generate 1,800 megawatts of hydropower, according to a 1994 World Bank report – clear benefits that got the World Bank interested in helping in the relocation project.

Water storage, Kundzewicz points out, is one of the best forms of flood prevention that serves more than one purpose. “Catch water where it falls,” he says. “Store it not only in gigantic reservoirs but also in the catchments – in the forests, the soil, the ground water aquifer – so that it does not immediately flow into rivers and increase flood risk. Plus, stored water is of much importance in times of no rain or low flow.” He points out that the process of converting forests to agriculture and then to urban areas reduces natural storage possibilities; water cannot infiltrate in a town that has a lot of impermeable surfaces, so it flows quickly into a river via the storm sewer system.

Japan has been generally successful at combating floods. Half the total population and country’s wealth (including the cities of Tokyo and Osaka) are situated in the flood plains, which take up only 10 percent of land surface. Thus, flood protection has become a part of life. In addition, the country has established a comprehensive flood control management that takes an integrated approach, including factors such as land-use zoning, flood forecasting and promoting the storage functions of river basins, says Kundzewicz. Major Japanese cities are protected by super-levees, which can be 10 metres high and up to 300 metres wide. The downside of these structures is the cost: USD 100 million per kilometre.

Such a solution is great for a rich country, but what about the rest of the world? “It’s a tough problem,” says Rodríguez-Iturbe. “Remember first that you can’t change nature. But you can try to determine which regions are more critical than others. And you can try to develop some kind of alarm system that relies on good forecasting. Here the developed world can help a lot.”

Kundzewicz says that improving the reliability, accuracy and advance timing of forecasting is one of the most critical issues around flood preparedness today. Add to that further elements of the emergency preparedness chain: warning, dissemination of warning, responsiveness of population and evacuation. Another option is to simply leave risky areas, he says. In the US, there are federal and state programmes for purchasing land and property in flood plains from willing sellers and reconstituting wetlands. Where this is not possible, the best solution is to be prepared.

“There is no such thing as complete protection against floods,” he says. “In unsafe locations one has to take the following attitude: Protect as far as technically possible and affordable, and then accommodate. In other words, prepare to live with them.”

Copyright 2003 Jack Jackson. All rights reserved.