Emergencies and Disasters

It is said that emergencies are only disasters in the way they are
handled. If that is true it is difficult not to be filled with
criticism for the government of Myanmar. There were few soldiers on
the streets of Yangon on the morning and afternoon of May 2, directly
after the largest cyclone in living memory struck Myanmar's largest
city and southern regions.



The government newspaper, "New Light of Myanmar"'s Friday edition,
published a short piece on their back page stating to be prepared for
rainstorms Friday night and wind speeds of 50 km/hour. Visiting Hlaing
Thayar Township two days afterwards, I spoke with some of the 10,000
homeless people camped out into the local high school 11, the areas
122 households were so damaged by the storm that this was still where
the majority of people were living. They told me they had not known
there was going to be a storm on the Friday. Naked children swarmed
around, as a mother described giving birth in the storm and others
explained how they had fled their home




The number 3 Cyclone struck the coast at 4pm on the Friday and reached
Yangon around 11pm. With an ominous black out of electricity
throughout the city, the winds and the rains began. Many people have
told me that they lost their roofs around midnight, and then waited
out the night in stair wells, or cowering in the cold debris of their
roofless homes. In truth, time was not a solid logical force that
night. A sense of time was lost as hundreds of thousands waited in the
pitch black darkness hoping for the sun to rise and put some shapes to
the crashing sounds of breaking glass and tearing metal that tore
through the night along with the 190km/hour winds.

Some time in the grey post cyclone quiet of May 3, residents of Yangon
and the southern delta emerged from their battered homes, to look upon
a world that had been made unrecognisable overnight. Like children,
woken in the midst of a sleep walk, eyes blinked as though not quite
able to bring the scene into focus, not able to believe that the
mangled remains of billboards, traffic lights and homes were indeed
the green, rambling streets of the city.

Picking their way through the tangled roots and branches of the
hundred year old trees and electric power lines that blocked every
direction, people's amazement at the devastation gave way to the
stunned look of disaster fatigue. Round each corner there was further
devastation, more trees down, another building with no windows or a
further monastery without a roof. Thousands wondered all day Saturday
in some post-Cyclone haze. When speaking with others to describe why
they were attempting to drive cars through streets blocked with
collapsed walls or uprroted trees every ten metres, people often
seemed to find it difficult to describe quite what they were doing and
why.



"I'm just looking at my city" said one man, crammed into his car with
all the waiters who work at his restaurant. And that is what many
seemed to need to do. Look at their city and thereby understand just
what had happened.