[ African disaster management experts make fact-finding trip to eastern Germany ]

Flood control in north and south

The traces of the disaster can still be seen. Lesoetsa Ntalenyane looks out over a denuded expanse of land. At this point, in August 2002, the river burst through the dike and simply washed away a secondary road. Upstream of the now re-surfaced carriageway, the signs of erosion are still visible; below it, excavators and bulldozers are hard at work. Lesoetsa Ntalenyane heads the disaster management service of the South African Kingdom of Lesotho. Today, though, he is looking at damage done by the flooding in eastern Germany, outside the “chemical triangle” town of Bitterfeld.

Together with nine other disaster management experts from Southern Africa, Ntalenyane was invited by InWEnt’s “Environment, Energy an Water” division together with the Foreign Office to take part in the Second International Conference on Early Warning (EWC II) in Bonn. After it, the group travelled through the parts of eastern Germany hit by the disastrous flooding of August 2002. “What are you doing to ensure you are better prepared the next time the river is in flood?”, Ntalenyane asked his Bitterfeld colleague Fred Walkow. “We now have a much better understanding of how the river works” was the reply. The district authority has developed a flood management concept which is currently being integrated into a regional concept. Fred Walkow is convinced that the most important challenge will be maintaining public awareness of the problem. “Prior to August 2002, we all thought flood disasters were something that happened in Africa or Asia, not in this country. Unless we act, that will soon be the public perception again.”

Disaster management needs to be a public issue. The experts who took part in the fact-finding tour are convinced of that. For two years, they have been working in collaboration with InWEnt to improve disaster management in Southern Africa. At a planning workshop staged after the trip at the Foreign Office, they cited the creation of an Internet-based communication network as a major priority. The idea of such a network would be to improve international cooperation and speed up the exchange of advance warnings. For cooperation with local media, it was recommended that a strategy should be developed to raise public awareness on a long-term basis. For even in Mozambique or South Africa, a natural disaster makes big waves for a while but then sinks swiftly into oblivion.

In the Bitterfeld flood plain, the experts from Southern Africa found no indication of the fact that, a little over a year ago, the waters of the Mulde River washed through many local homes. The façades are re-painted, the dikes re-built, the roads repaired – and even the district hospital, which had to be evacuated, is operating as usual again after completion of the renovation work. “Where did you get the money for the cleanup and what were the criteria for its distribution?” asks Silvano Langa, director of the National Disasters Management Institute (INGC) in Mozambique. The answer sounds astonishingly simple: “In the hot phase, money was not a topic at all; we just set to work”, says Fred Walkow. The first compensation for damage to homes and businesses was paid out fast; sums of less than 30,000 euros were even paid without official corroboration. And to finance the outlay, the government borrowed more money.

“In Mozambique, nothing can start until funds are available”, groans Yohannis Georgis, who works as a disaster management consultant in Maputo for the UN development programme UNDP. “Without money, no one lifts a finger.” In an emergency, the main focus is on mobilising foreign aid, which is the job of the foreign ministry as the department in charge of the disaster management service. Foreign aid was also received in Saxony: the Russian army sent a unit with heavy clearance equipment; China sent empty sandbags. The disaster management experts from Africa were also impressed by the way the professional relief workers cooperated with volunteers. “Didn’t volunteers get in the professionals’ way?”, they asked. “It’s certainly easier to work with soldiers”, Fred Walkow said. But they’d never have managed to re-build the Bitterfeld dike on their own. Many of the volunteers were well trained as a result of having worked for the Red Cross or the governmental disaster relief agency THW.

A quarter of the population of the Bitterfeld administrative district had to be evacuated during the flooding. There were no plans for such an operation, yet it went without a hitch. “Most people were taken in by relatives or accommodated in hotels”, said Fred Walkow. In Africa, it would have been a very different story. “A flood disaster in Mozambique quickly produces tens of thousands of refugees, who have to be accommodated in camps”, said Torsten Wegner, coordinator of InWEnt’s disaster management HR development project in Maputo. In the big flood disaster of early 2000, half a million Mozambicans had to abandon their homes and hundreds of lives were lost. In other areas, too, there are marked differences between the disaster management problems encountered in Germany and those of Southern Africa. In South Africa, disaster relief workers need to safeguard their ultra-modern technical infrastructure from vandalism and theft; in Saxony, the worst likely to happen to facilities is that they get daubed with grafitti.

More than 100 water gauges along the upper reaches of the Elbe tributaries supply data for water level forecasts at least 24 hours in advance. In future, through cooperation with the Czech authorities, that minimum warning time will be extended to 60 hours. During the August 2002 floods, however, the system literally broke down. Many gauges diappeared, swept away by the floodwaters. But scientists were later able to reconstruct the data, which is why flood experts now have a clear picture of what caused the Elbe flood disaster. This has prompted a “conceptual review”. “In the past, the dikes would simply have been built higher”, says Fred Walkow in Bitterfeld. “Now we try to give rivers more space to spread out and keep housing and intensive farming outside flood plains”. Achieving that takes a lot of laborious discussion, however, because unless the communities affected are convinced that an action plan makes sense, the measures will not be given a chance to work.