chapter 4 - DRK

Strictly under embargo until Wednesday 22 September at 00:01 GMT (02:01 Geneva time)36CHAPTER 299million people per year between 2000 and 2008. While we do not know how manypeople affected by floods live in urban areas, we can understand that it must be a significantproportion.While it is possible to identify certain disasters as urban disasters, it becomes morecomplicated to assess what proportion of the total losses of a disaster are in urban areasand what proportion are outside the urban areas. At the global or regional scale, wehave little sense of what proportion of deaths and injuries are within urban centres.For instance, Cyclone Nargis caused an estimated 140,000 deaths in Myanmar andhad serious impacts in urban centres including Yangon, but we have little idea of whatproportion of these impacts were in urban areas.Precise information about impacts in urban areas for a disaster that affected a region isnot widely reported, yet it is important in order to understand who, and what, has beenaffected. Consider, for example, the 1988 floods in Bangladesh, which inundated 52 percent of the country. This flood also impacted Dhaka, the nation’s capital, which then hadabout 6 million residents. Flood waters covered 85 per cent of the city for several weeks.For two weeks Dhaka was completely cut off, with depths of inundation ranging from0.3 to more than 4.5 metres. Across the country, 45 million people, of a total populationof 110 million, were affected by the floods. It is estimated that between 2.2 and 4million of the affected were in Dhaka, or some 30 to 60 per cent of the city’s population.The total death toll is reported to have been around 2,379 deaths for all the affectedregions with 150 deaths in Dhaka. Ten years later, in 1998, floods again affected Dhaka,covering large portions of the city for a two-month period. An estimated 918 peopledied in the 1998 floods, but the number of deaths, if any, that occurred in the capitalwas not reported. We do know that 30 per cent of housing in the Dhaka metropolitanarea sustained damage, and that almost 32 per cent of damages were to houses of thevery poor, while 36 per cent of houses belonging to lower-middle class and poor peoplewere damaged. In one sense, distinguishing between rural and urban deaths and injuriesmight be considered inappropriate in that disaster risk reduction should seek to preventthem all. But this lack of a more spatially precise idea of where deaths and injuries occuralso hinders an understanding of where and how risk reduction should take place.Cities are affected by a wide range of disaster events, which extend beyond our conceptionof ‘natural’ hazards. In African Cities of Hope and Risk, Ben Wisner and MarkPelling used the data available from CRED to identify 166 urban disasters affecting28 African cities between 1997 and 2008. They identified natural hazards such asurban drought, earthquakes, windstorms, floods and extreme temperatures. Floodsare most represented in the data, accounting for one-third of the total 3.3 millionpeople affected by urban disasters in Africa. However, disasters in cities are also largelytechnological hazards. A review of urban disasters shows the wide range of disastersthat occur in African cities, such as aircraft crashes, fires and explosions, ferry-boatsinkings, subsidence and sink holes, illegal dumping of hazardous materials, shack