A child injured in the Gujarat earthquake (courtesy of UNICEF/Paula Bronstein/Liaison)

In India, the same scenario was repeated on an even greater scale in Gujarat: 12,000 bodies have been recovered from the ruins of apartment houses, hospitals and smaller residences. The final number could reach 100,000. An area the size of Wales or West Virginia has been reduced to rubble.

These terrible losses were not necessary.

It is not part of the human condition to be buried under a landslide triggered by an earthquake.

Earthquakes happen. But disaster follows because of human action and inaction.

In the case of the middle-income neighbourhood of Las Colinas in Santa Tecla, just outside El Salvador's capital San Salvador, 400 homes were lost beneath debris from a collapsing slope above.

This was not an "act of God".

UN Photo

Road-building, deforestation and property development on the slope above Las Colinas should never have been allowed. These activities in a high-risk environment almost certainly contributed to the instability of the steep slope. In fact, a group of Las Colinas residents and environmental groups were in court in 2000 to stop development on that slope and the ridge above. The judge ruled against them. Experts agree that steep slopes made of volcanic soil are unstable. Geologists know this. Planners know this.

It is not an "act of God" that no more than 10 per cent of the multi-storey structures in Indian cities are built according to earthquake resistant norms.

The earthquake didn't kill, but the buildings did.

In El Salvador and Gujarat, hungry rural people have been searching for work in the cities, living in makeshift dwellings in some of the most potentially dangerous areas in an earthquake, with little resources or initiative to make their homes safer, on land they do not own. And the middle class is attracted to the rapidly growing edge of the sprawling cities. Developers rush to fill this market demand, often in too much haste to observe building codes. This is where the landslide buried hundreds in Las Colinas and where new apartment houses for Ahmedabad's salaried workers came crashing down. In both recent earthquakes, hospitals either collapsed, killing patients and staff, as in the city of Bhuj in Gujarat, or they became useless because of damage. The main medical laboratory in El Salvador's capital is unable to function because bottles of chemicals for medical tests were not secured on their shelves with simple restraints. Forty per cent of El Salvador's health care facilities suffered disabling damage. Yet it is very well known how to protect health care structures and their non-structural elements.

So, what has the United Nations family been doing? Many agencies within the UN family joined with other international scientific and humanitarian organizations, national committees, non-governmental organizations and citizen groups in an effort called the IDNDR, or the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (1990-1999). Point of fact: The combined cost of disasters worldwide, according to the Center for Epidemiology of Disaster in Belgium, was $741 billion in this period, in terms of human lives 589,000. The number of deaths has climbed each year since 1994. Remember, these are officially reported deaths; the actual number could be even higher.

But, another point of fact: This period was one of accelerated and intensive international exchanges of scientific information. More than enough knowledge was generated, refined, debated, systematized and disseminated to have prevented the loss of life in the landslide in Las Colinas. That knowledge could have dramatically reduced the number of lives claimed in Gujarat, and it certainly could have protected priority infrastructure, such as schools and hospitals.

Going into the IDNDR, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) had already begun to accumulate a vast amount of detailed advice about protecting hospitals. They were spurred on by the collapse of two major hospitals in Mexico City in 1985, one of which had been the principal maternity hospital. The world still remembers images of the handful of "miracle babies" who were rescued from under the massive concrete slabs. Three large volumes of guidelines are available gratis from PAHO in Spanish and Portuguese.

Why, one must ask, wasn't this knowledge put to use in El Salvador and, by extension through the rest of the World Health Organization, applied to the major civilian hospital in Bhuj?

Turkey earthquake/Federation

During the IDNDR, schools were also a priority focus. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) had a programme for strengthening schools, and the Organization of American States has an initiative that is attempting to do the same thing, just to mention two.

In its last five years, the IDNDR gave much attention to public education, and in its last three years it developed a comprehensive project for urban earthquake risk reduction called RADIUS. Nine pilot cities took part, with another 84 associate cities. Where it worked best, as in Tijuana, Mexico and Izmir, Turkey, there was strong support from the local administration and many local universities and professional groups. The project developed a low-cost method of anticipating urban earthquake damage and loss, and a model for creating an action plan to mitigate those losses. Tijuana is about the same size as San Salvador, the distance between them is not so great and the language is the same. Why, one has to wonder, were the methods developed by RADIUS in Tijuana not applied in San Salvador?

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