A NOAA satellite image of Hurricane Wilma taken on October 19, 2005 REUTERS/NOAA/Handout
Today&${esc.hash}39;s blog comes from Cuba, where AlertNet journalist Ruth Gidley is investigating how a country smack in the middle of "hurricane alley" is so successful in keeping natural hazards from becoming disasters. May 31, 2006I&${esc.hash}39;m in Havana, at a seminar aimed at helping journalists cover the hurricane season, which officially starts on June 1. The bad news is I&${esc.hash}39;m sitting next to the journalist who answers his mobile phone at least once during every session, often twice. No one else seems to mind.
This feels like Central America. I&${esc.hash}39;ve been to a wedding in Guatemala where the priest&${esc.hash}39;s mobile phone rang in the middle of the ceremony. He fished it out of his cassock, walked to the back of the church to answer it, then came back to finish off the mass without anyone but me getting the giggles or giving him angry glares.
The good news is that on my other side I&${esc.hash}39;m lucky to meet journalists from the places that tend to bear the brunt of the bad weather when big storms hit Cuba. One&${esc.hash}39;s from Pinar del R????????????????o, on the southwestern coast, and the other&${esc.hash}39;s from the Isla de la Juventud - which means Island of Youth.
I&${esc.hash}39;m interested to know why their communities are so deft at keeping natural hazards from becoming humanitarian crises. When hurricanes hit Cuba, death tolls are typically minimal. The same storms often wreck havoc in near-by countries such as Haiti.
How do Cubans know how best to respond in the face of danger? How is disaster preparedness effectively instilled in a population of 11.3 million?
Most Cubans don&${esc.hash}39;t tend to rely too heavily on the Internet, since not many of them have access to it. Even though Cuba is training its children to be among the most computer-literate in Latin America, the country is less connected to the Web than Haiti.
For every 1,000 people, 13 have Internet access, according to the International Telecommunication Union, compared with 61 in Haiti. It sounds like most of this is down to the ruling Communist Party&${esc.hash}39;s desire for control over access. So maybe doctors, librarians and some journalists are online, while more people have access to email or to the country&${esc.hash}39;s national intranet.
Not surprisingly, several people tell me there&${esc.hash}39;s a black market in Internet access, but it costs at least ${esc.dollar}30 a month for an Internet package, an international journalist tells me. That&${esc.hash}39;s for one hour a day.
Cuba&${esc.hash}39;s mobile phone access is low too, with seven cell phones per 1,000, while Haitians have 49. Cuba&${esc.hash}39;s ahead in landlines, with 68 per 1,000 people, compared with 17 in Haiti, but there are queues by payphones in the street.
It might not have many telephones, but Cuba&${esc.hash}39;s civil defence system must be one of the best in the world. Although the army is trained in disaster response - evacuation, rescue and shelter - it&${esc.hash}39;s civilians who take charge of evacuations. It&${esc.hash}39;s all managed through the normal political channels, with local Revolutionary Defence Committees leading the way, not a separate disaster response structure.
People&${esc.hash}39;s livestock and pets are usually included in evacuations, something other countries often neglect, leaving people with the impossible choice of leaving for safety or keeping their animals alive.
Between 80 and 85 percent of evacuees take refuge with neighbours rather than communal shelters, according to Domingo Carretero, a high-up official in the National Guard for Civil Defence. "I receive people in my house," he says. When floods are coming, neighbours who live on the lower floors of his apartment block climb the stairs to stay with him until danger passes.
If an area&${esc.hash}39;s been completely evacuated, the army moves in to protect it and make sure people&${esc.hash}39;s belongings don&${esc.hash}39;t get stolen. Authorities turn off electricity in affected areas until it&${esc.hash}39;s cleaned up, to avoid more accidents if people come across exposed wires just after a hurricane&${esc.hash}39;s passed through.
Local committees fine people if they don&${esc.hash}39;t follow the rules, or do anything that puts the community at risk. There&${esc.hash}39;s a tight control on new buildings - like factories and tourist sites - to make sure they&${esc.hash}39;re not jeopardising anyone&${esc.hash}39;s safety.
On top of regular updates over the radio and television, there&${esc.hash}39;s a system of phone messages, so if the electricity is down, people can call and hear a recorded announcement of the latest information.
Everyone is drilled on the phases of a disaster - starting with the informative phase, moving up to an alert, and finally the full-scale alarm. Disasters are part of the school curriculum, alongside out-of-hours clubs offering activities to teach children more. Universities include classes on civil defence, and adults carry on learning the latest in the workplace.
Cuba&${esc.hash}39;s good at making the link between its scientists and its decision-making officials, and then communicating their plans to the general public. In places where rainfall upstream could flood a town, authorities can evacuate in two hours.
Some communities rehearse evacuations. But the system doesn&${esc.hash}39;t always work. In July 2005, Hurricane Dennis hit early in the season and killed 16 people. In Haiti or China that wouldn&${esc.hash}39;t be a high death toll, but in Cuba - with a population of about 11 million - it&${esc.hash}39;s a failure.
Carretero - and everyone else I ask at the seminar organised by the Jose Marti International Institute for Journalism - says it&${esc.hash}39;s because it hit the east of the island, which hadn&${esc.hash}39;t experienced anything like it for years, and people didn&${esc.hash}39;t really believe it was coming. They&${esc.hash}39;ve probably learnt their lesson now.
In late May, at least two people died when flash floods hit Havana after massive rainfall. Carretero says their homes were too close to a river. And it was pretty unusual circumstances. There had just been 120 mm (5 inches) of rainfall in two hours, when 100mm (4 inches) in 24 hours would already be classified as "intense". A resident in the neighbourhood said the destroyed houses had been declared uninhabitable 20 years ago but authorities had failed to provide alternative housing.
Carretero says the government is building 100,000 new houses a year.
Despite the blips, Cuba is a world leader in disaster mitigation and response, and Carretero has every right to be proud. But other countries can make similar boasts. A journalist from Barbados tells Carretero her country has efficient local committees too. Jewel Forde says volunteers know exactly who might need extra help - a single mother with three children under 10, for example, or someone who&${esc.hash}39;s elderly or diabetic. And the state gives grants to people who&${esc.hash}39;ve lost their homes if they weren&${esc.hash}39;t insured.
Cubans are quick to point out their record in comparison with the United States, where Hurricane Katrina&${esc.hash}39;s impact on the poor people of New Orleans in 2005 shocked the world. Or France, where a heat wave killed hundreds of old people during a searingly hot summer not so long ago.
Most of the 2,000 people who died during a terrible 2004 hurricane season were in Haiti, wracked by poverty, political turmoil and environmental degradation. More than 150 people died in the United States. Meanwhile Cuba, Jamaica and Dominican Republic had minimal death tolls.
"(Cuba) is not a perfect model," Carretero says in a rare show of modesty. "We still have problems. Not everyone follows the law, especially investors. But we&${esc.hash}39;re doing things that reduce vulnerability, and we think our experience is relevant for other countries."
May 30, 2006I get my first clue that Cubans don&${esc.hash}39;t expect to die in a sudden disaster as soon as I leave the airport - the people who collect me both put on their seatbelts. Just across the Caribbean, in Central America, I&${esc.hash}39;ve never seen anyone do that. The experts say people usually take more risks when their lives are already on the edge, so I start thinking that maybe Cubans feel safe.
It&${esc.hash}39;s hard to get across the combination of high technology and casual decline that permeates the Forecasting Centre at the Cuban Meteorological Institute. Up a bumpy road, past some goats, staff are using the latest French computer software surrounded by fading walls, a dusty, rusting filing cabinet and piles of cardboard boxes. The building is being fixed up - ready for the hurricane season which starts on June 1 and lasts until the end of November - and one of the new doors has "SATELLITE" written on it in shaky red pen.
The satellite dish in front is surrounded by palm trees and hibiscus bushes, next to a sign that says: "Nothing will hold us back or make us retreat from our struggle."
One of the centre&${esc.hash}39;s researchers, Maritza Ballester Perez, says they have a good relationship with U.S. weather experts. "There aren&${esc.hash}39;t any problems. Actually, we exchange quite a lot of information." She says the U.S. meteorologists call when a storm is imminent, and they compare notes to predict its trajectory.
But the meteorological institute is clearly a national treasure, with military installations nearby keeping an eye over it and the oil refinery down the hill.
Dr Perez is a self-confessed conservative on the global warming debate. "I don&${esc.hash}39;t think you can conclude yet that stronger hurricanes are because of global warming. I still think it&${esc.hash}39;s a cyclical process, and maybe in the past the lack of airplane technology and satellites meant some hurricanes weren&${esc.hash}39;t detected," she says.
Everyone says it&${esc.hash}39;s going to be a bumper season. The Cubans are predicting 15 tropical storms for the season ahead, with nine of them likely to be hurricane strength. That&${esc.hash}39;s more or less in the middle of the range of forecasts by meteorologists from other countries like Britain and the United States.
Each Cuban province has its own meteorological experts, who pass on information to Havana, but the message to the public is centralised in the capital.
When a hurricane&${esc.hash}39;s on its way, the media broadcast the message over and over again in the run-up, replaying footage of past hurricanes to remind people just how bad it could be. And if people need to evacuate, they do it willingly, on the whole. So there is an advantage to having a state-controlled media.
The meteorologists work flat out during the tropical storm season - 12 hours on, 12 hours off - and when a hurricane&${esc.hash}39;s going on, they spend 48 hours or more in the institute, sleeping in the office.
Ana Teresita Mirian Yannis is one of the public faces of the meteorological institute, broadcasting every three hours when a hurricane&${esc.hash}39;s on the way. She tells us bashfully how she doesn&${esc.hash}39;t like wearing glasses in front of the cameras. "I always lose my voice when it&${esc.hash}39;s hurricane season," she says.
The flashy computer maps she stands next to are a far cry from what I saw last time I was in Cuba. Ten years ago, the TV images showed forecasters pointing at wonky sheets of paper tacked to the wall when they wanted to explain that a storm was coming.
Ramon Perez from the Climate Centre at Cuba&${esc.hash}39;s Meteorological Institute says there have already been more hurricanes measuring category three, four or five this decade than any other decade since records began. And we&${esc.hash}39;re only halfway through it.
He says predicting hurricanes is a difficult science. There&${esc.hash}39;s a 100km (60 miles) margin of error in 24 hours. "Some models are better than others, but the best model isn&${esc.hash}39;t the best model for every case."
Hurricanes don&${esc.hash}39;t usually strike within 10 degrees north or south of the equator, but things could change, Dr. Perez says. "Zero probability doesn&${esc.hash}39;t exist."
And since a hurricane can have a 300km (200 mile) radius, "You can&${esc.hash}39;t think that just because you&${esc.hash}39;re not in the centre, you&${esc.hash}39;ll be ok," Dr. Perez says. A hurricane might be moving at 200 km (120 miles) per hour at its centre, but even if it&${esc.hash}39;s going at just 30 km (20 miles) per hour at the edge, that can still cause quite some damage.
Ricardo Sanchez, regional director of the U.N. Environmental Programme (UNEP), makes a compelling argument that the world&${esc.hash}39;s economic systems are contributing to global warming, which in turn is going to make hurricanes happen more often.
Water levels are rising with global warming, and it&${esc.hash}39;s not just coastal communities that need to watch out. When the sea rises, hurricanes will reach farther inland. Panama, for example, doesn&${esc.hash}39;t have cyclones at the moment, but if the world heats up, it will probably start having them, he says. A Panamanian journalist who&${esc.hash}39;s come all the way to Cuba to ask about this is looking worried and vindicated at the same time.
Being Cuba, every mention of the environment includes a comment on economic systems, and how there are strong business lobbies who want to maintain the status quo for their own profits, even if its not in the planet&${esc.hash}39;s best interests.
It&${esc.hash}39;s a bit crude, but it strikes me how environmental issues are often presented other places as if they were isolated from the dirty worlds of politics and economics, as if saving the earth was just a matter of persuading the baddies to stop cutting down too many rainforest trees or getting naughty children to turn out the lights more often.
Dr Sanchez talks about Chile, where gold deposits have apparently been newly discovered in the Andes, underneath a glacier. A mining company wants to remove the glacier and extract the gold. And then put the glacier back. "This is creating a big scandal in Chile," Dr Sanchez says. I&${esc.hash}39;m not surprised.
He moves on to urbanisation. Latin Americans migrate to cities to make a better living, or to escape wars, he says. "You can make a better life breathing fire at traffic lights than being completely out of reach of services in the countryside."
People don&${esc.hash}39;t live on precarious hillsides out of choice, he points out. It&${esc.hash}39;s because there&${esc.hash}39;s nowhere else to go, and banks won&${esc.hash}39;t lend poor people the money to build anywhere better. "It&${esc.hash}39;s not about whether a country can attract enough private capital - it&${esc.hash}39;s whether the state is playing a strong enough role," the doctor says.
Dr Sanchez recommends an essay by someone at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called "Anthropogenic effects on tropical cyclone activity", which he says every journalist who&${esc.hash}39;s covering hurricanes should read. If anyone else finds it first, let me know what you think.
He says there&${esc.hash}39;s already 20 percent less rain in tropical regions than there used to be, and more extreme events like droughts and floods. He&${esc.hash}39;s holding up a huge, hard-backed book with lots of satellite maps in it to prove his point. "One Planet, Many People", a UNEP publication, looks like the ideal coffee-table book for the global warming fanatic in your life.
You&${esc.hash}39;ve probably heard a version of Dr Sanchez&${esc.hash}39;s final words before, coming out of someone else&${esc.hash}39;s mouth: "A dollar spent in prevention saves ${esc.dollar}8 in reconstruction."
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