NICARAGUA
Nature as a Sword of
Damocles
By José Adán Silva
MANAGUA (IPS) - More than 1.8
million Nicaraguans are at high risk due
to the various natural disasters that
strike this Central American country,
according to Civil Defence authorities.
Back in March, prompted by the tragic
earthquakes of Jan. 12 in Haiti and Feb.
27 in Chile, leftist President Daniel
Ortega issued an urgent order to the
armed forces to set up a permanent
commission to help the country confront
natural disasters.
According to the 2010 Special Plan for
Natural Disasters, which Civil Defence
delivered to President Ortega earlier
this month, approximately one million
people who live near the Pacific coast
are in grave danger in the case of a
strong earthquake.
Brigadier General Mario Perezcassar,
head of this specialised army corps,
told IPS that Nicaragua, with a
population of nearly 5.7 million, is
categorised as a "multi-threat" country
due to the numerous risk scenarios from
quakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides,
floods, hurricanes, forest fires and
tsunamis.
There are some 123,000 people, living on
1.5 million hectares of forest, who face
the threat of forest fires during
Nicaragua's dry season, from November to
April. The threat was intensified in
2007, when Hurricane Felix upturned
millions of trees, creating a vast
tinderbox.
According to Plan Earthquake, based on
calculations by the military, 48
municipalities are at high risk, largely
along the Pacific coast. "There are
slightly more than a million people
concentrated along 427 kilometres of the
Pacific coastal zone," said the military
commander.
The area of highest risk is Managua,
which suffered major earthquakes in 1931
and 1972, each claiming thousands of
human lives.
The nation's capital is home to more
than 1.5 million people and is criss-
crossed by 18 seismic faults.
Twenty-five percent of the
infrastructure is considered "vulnerable
and obsolete."
According to the city of Managua's Urban
Planning Department, houses are the most
vulnerable structures. Poverty has led
to spontaneous settlements, built
without regulation or adherence to
construction standards.
An estimated 200 poor communities and
neighbourhoods, with more than 300,000
people living in crowded conditions, are
situated on Managua's fault lines.
A study by the National System for
Disaster Prevention, Mitigation and
Attention, presented in January,
estimated that a quake in Managua
registering more than 6.9 on the Richter
scale would leave 30,801 people dead,
123,202 injured and 317,304 homeless, as
well as 42,884 homes destroyed or
severely damaged.
Civil Defence also found that the
disasters most likely to occur are
floods and hurricanes.
Plan Winter, which like Plan Earthquake
forms part of the 2010 Special Plan for
Natural Disasters, was launched in May,
the start of the rainy season, and
covers 76 high-risk municipalities. It
identified 1,036 "critical points" that
are prone to flooding, with more than
709,000 people at risk.
Of the areas studied, the most
vulnerable are Managua and the two
Autonomous Regions of the Nicaraguan
Atlantic, located on the Caribbean
coast.
The Nicaraguan capital, situated in a
valley surrounded by hills and next to
Lake Managua, has 114 kilometres
threatened by landslides and flooding,
endangering hundreds of homes, according
to Plan Winter data.
As for hurricanes, there are more than
350,000 people in constant danger in 74
communities along the Caribbean coast.
The governmental Nicaraguan Institute
for Territorial Research, which oversees
meteorology, has forecast for 2010 as
many as 15 tropical storms and eight
hurricanes, of which four could be
intense.
Civil Defence also has a plan for
tsunamis, identifying and monitoring 24
high-risk sites, and has set up
early-warning systems on the six active
volcanoes near the Pacific coast.
In a conversation with IPS, scientist
and environmentalist Jaime Incer
Barquero described Nicaragua as "one of
the most explosive countries in the
world."
"It's located on an active volcanic
chain and geographically situated in a
natural corridor for hurricanes and
climate phenomena that move along the
Atlantic coast each year," he said.
According to Incer's book "Natural
Disasters of Nicaragua," of the 29
biggest catastrophes that occurred in
Latin America and the Caribbean between
1972 and 2007, nine took place in this
country.
Out in the Pacific Ocean, 150 kilometres
from shore, lies the boundary of the
active Cocos and Caribbean tectonic
plates, which have generated the
strongest earthquakes in Central America
in the past 200 years.
According to Incer, Nicaragua has one of
the world's highest probabilities of
death from natural disaster, taking into
account that in a highly seismic country
like Iran the rate is one out of 23,000,
and one out of two million in the
quake-prone western U.S. state of
California.
Faced with the variety of threats, the
army and the institutions that make up
the National System for Disaster
Prevention, Mitigation and Attention
have conducted 95 organisational and
training activities in 145
municipalities.
More than 1,200 disaster drills have
been conducted, involving 12,000
emergency experts and volunteers, 12,000
military personnel, and a network of
support from police, firefighters and
medical teams. |
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