Flooding Spurs Disaster Zones in Myanmar Skip to main content

Flooding Spurs Disaster Zones in Myanmar

By WAI MOE
YANGON, Myanmar — Myanmar’s president on Friday declared four rural regions to be disaster zones, as floods and landslides continued to cause severe damage and the government faced criticism for its slow response to the emergency.
President Thein Sein said the disaster zones covered the states of Chin and Rakhine, and the Sagaing and Magway regions in western and central Myanmar.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said that as of Friday, at least 21 people had been killed and as many as 110,000 had been severely affected by several weeks of flooding. Local media outlets reported on Saturday that the death toll was rising in the affected areas, including Rakhine State. Heavy rains were expected to continue across the country.
Myanmar’s government has been criticized for what many say has been a slow and inadequate response, as well as a failure to learn from previous disasters. In 2008, the military government in power at the time was ill prepared to deal with the damage caused by a cyclone that hit the country, killing as many as 140,000 people in the Irrawaddy Delta region. Relief efforts were slow, and the government blocked international organizations from providing aid.
“Following the Cyclone Nargis disaster, Myanmar authorities formed a task force to respond to natural disasters in the future,” said U Win Myo Thu, director of EcoDev, an environmental organization in Myanmar. “But the current flooding disaster shows us the task force is not working.”
Mr. Win Myo Thu said that “heavy rain, mismanagement of irrigation projects and dramatic deforestation” were the main causes of the current flooding in Myanmar. He added that over the past two decades the country’s leaders had initiated several dam projects “without proper management and research” and had mismanaged logging operations.
Myanmar’s population has learned not to rely on the government during emergencies; shortly after the flooding began, civic groups began collecting money and supplies for flood victims.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/world/asia/flooding-spurs-disaster-zones-in-myanmar.html?_r=0
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