Philippines Haiyan rebuilding 'inadequate', says UN

Bangkok Post via AFP: The Philippines has not done enough to rebuild after Super Typhoon Haiyan, as thousands remain in shanties without power or water for nearly two years, a United Nations representative said Saturday.

Many storm survivors in the central region have had to endure relocating to evacuation camps up to three times since Haiyan struck in 2013, and the sub-standard housing leaves them vulnerable to future typhoons, said Chaloka Beyani, UN special rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons.

"While the government is to be commended in terms of its immediate responses, its attention to ensuring sustainable durable solutions for IDPs (internally displaced persons) remains inadequate to date," Beyani said in a statement posted on the UN website.

Beyani was in the Philippines in late July to check on the government's handling of people displaced by Haiyan and by fighting between the military and Muslim rebels in the south.

Aside from falling short of safety standards, the wood-and-tin "bunkhouses" also leave women and girls vulnerable to sexual abuse and early pregnancy, Beyani said. The box-like shanties also rob the storm survivors of their "privacy and dignity" as they struggle to rebuild their lives, he said....

An aerial view of Tacloban City after Typhoon Haiyan struck, shot by Russell Watkins/Department for International Development, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Vanuatu provides lessons in cyclone survival

Stephen Coates in Reuters: Villagers in Vanuatu buried food and fresh water as one of the strongest storms on record bore down on them, fleeing to churches, schools and even coconut drying kilns as 300 kph winds and massive seas tore their flimsy houses to the ground.

Despite reports of utter devastation six days after Cyclone Pam pummeled the impoverished South Pacific island nation, Vanuatu appears to be providing something of a lesson in how to survive a category 5 storm. The United Nations says the official death toll is 11 and Prime Minister Joe Natuman told Reuters it would not rise significantly.

"The important thing is that the people survived," he said in an interview outside his office overlooking the hard-hit capital of Port Vila. "If the people survived, we can rebuild."

...Two days ago, a helicopter flight over the north of Efate revealed scenes of total devastation with at least one coastal village destroyed and no sign of life.  When visited a day later, dozens of villagers were back rebuilding with what materials they could find and reporting only one injury, said Barnes, who was on Cayman Island in 2004 when Hurricane Ivan hit.

Sebastian Rhodes Stampa, disaster co-ordinator for the U.N.'s humanitarian affairs office said he was impressed by the country's ability to deal with the storm. "In very few places that I have worked have I seen such a resilient population," Rhodes Stampa, who has worked in major disaster sites including the Philippines after Typhoon Haiyan, told Reuters in Port Vila....

The Mamas Market in Port Vila, Vanuatu, on March 15, 2015. Shot by Graham Crumb, Wikimedia Commons via imagicity, under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported Licence 

Food concerns mount in Vanuatu after monster cyclone

Reuters: International aid agencies ramped up appeals for cyclone-hit Vanuatu on Wednesday, warning that the powerful storm that affected more than two-thirds of the South Pacific island nation had wiped out crops and destroyed fishing fleets, raising the risk of hunger and disease.

Residents of the southern island of Tanna said food and basic supplies were running low, while relief workers were still battling to reach many islands pummeled by Cyclone Pam's gusts of more than 300 kph (185 mph) on Friday and Saturday.

The United Nations said the official death toll was 11, but many officials anticipate that number will rise once they are able to more thoroughly inspect the outer islands of the scattered archipelago.

 Sweden said on Tuesday that a Swedish man aged around 80 who had emigrated was among the dead. Sune Gudnitz, Pacific head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said getting food supplies to isolated communities was a concern. "The challenge of getting things out, whether it's people or goods, remains. We want to avoid creating a bottleneck in (Vanuatu capital) Port Vila, so we very quickly need to work out a plan for getting things out," Gudnitz said....

A post-Pam boat graveyard in Vanuatu, shot by Graham Crumb, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license

More Filipinos pushed into poverty by Haiyan, high rice prices

Terra Daily via AFP: Super typhoon Haiyan and surging rice prices pushed the number of Filipinos living in poverty to 25.8 percent in the first half of last year despite strong economic growth, official data released Friday showed.

The 1.2 percent rise was compared to the 24.6 percent of people in the Philippines who were considered poor a year earlier, the Philippine Statistics Authority said in a statement. The increase followed Haiyan which struck in November 2013, killing more than 7,350 people and ravaging an area as big as Portugal in the nation of around 100 million people.

The government agency deemed a family of five who lived off 8,778 pesos ($199.3) a month -- roughly $1.33 per person a day -- to be poor.

Nevertheless the Philippines, one of Asia's fastest-growing economies, saw the average income of Filipinos rise by 6.4 percent in the first six months of 2014, Economic Planning Secretary Arsenio Balisacan said in the statement. "The very high prices of food wiped out the gains in per capita income," he added. The areas ravaged by Haiyan saw the most substantial jumps in poverty levels, he said....

Liberia's long road to recovery from ebola

IRIN: Liberia has lifted nationwide curfews and reopened its land borders with key trading partners Sierra Leone and Guinea, but a full recovery from the economic impact of the Ebola outbreak will take time, experts say.

“The reopening of the border is going to have an impact immediately, both in terms of livelihoods and the availability of food, as well as informal trade,” said Errol Graham, the World Bank’s country economist for Liberia, who spoke to IRIN from Virginia. “But there is going to be a lot of asymmetry between the [speed of] recovery and the crisis. The crisis was an immediate thing because of fear and aversion. The recovery is going to take a little longer.”

Within hours of the reopening of the border, people and merchandise began to flow from one side to the other. Local markets, once again stocked with fresh produce, meat and home goods, buzzed with activity, for the first time in more than six months.

In the interior of Liberia, Graham said, “We are also seeing, with the abatement of the crisis, people starting to go back to work and we expect to see more of that over time. And as foreigners who were involved in concessions in the natural resource sector come back, we expect to see more improvements in the employment situation.”...

The city of Kakata in Liberia, shot by Thadk, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license 

UN agency continues distribution of emergency health kits to Nepal's flood survivors

UN News Centre: Five months after a series of landslides and subsequent flooding brought devastation to large swathes of Nepal, thousands of survivors continue to remain exposed to bitter temperatures and wintry conditions, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has warned.

The UN agency – which has a mandate to focus on improving sexual and reproductive health issues for women around the world – has been active on the ground since mid-August when the Government of Nepal launched an appeal for humanitarian assistance following the massive flooding and landslides which affected some 130,000 people across 23 of the country’s districts.

The agency has since been distributing so-called ‘dignity kits’ containing warm winter clothes, flashlights, soap, and sanitary napkins, as well as reproductive health kits to uprooted families. The reproductive health kits, for their part, are made up of medicines, equipment to support safe deliveries, family planning supplies and supplies to aid in the treatment of rape.

Overall, each kit is designed to provide reproductive health services to between 10,000 and 30,000 women for a three-month period....

A September 2014 flood in Nepal, shot by Beemall.99, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license 

Second Christmas in ruins in Philippine disaster zone

Terra Daily via AFP: Thousands of residents of the typhoon-weary city of Tacloban in the mainly Catholic Philippines prepared Wednesday to mark their second Christmas in ruins following two giant storms. A huge streetside Christmas lantern was the sole sign of the nation's most festive holiday in the city's Magallanes district, where shanties have replaced a community flattened by tsunami-like waves whipped up by Super Typhoon Haiyan 13 months ago.

Magallanes shopkeeper Aida Comendador, 46, lined up at the nearby local social welfare office to collect up to 10,000 pesos ($224) in government subsidies for repairs to her severely damaged house in the city on the central island of Leyte.

"We've managed to put up a ramshackle shelter out of 20 pieces of roofing sheets donated by a Catholic charity, but we still don't have a door and proper beds," the mother of three told AFP.

Haiyan, the strongest typhoon ever to hit land, left 7,350 people dead or missing, and the coastal neighbourhood of Magallanes highlights the slow pace of reconstruction.

Roughly a million people need to be moved away from Magallanes and other coastal areas deemed vulnerable to the monster waves generated by Haiyan, according to a 160-billion-peso ($3.6 billion) government rebuilding plan....

Temporary shelters provided by the United Nations sit beside remaining damage from Typhoon Haiyan as the aircraft carrying U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Tacloban City, Philippines, to announce $25 million in fresh U.S. recovery aid on December 18, 2013. [State Department photo/ Public Domain]

The ‘Yolanda’ tragedy

Babe Romualdez in the Philippine Star: It’s been a year after that fateful day on November 8, 2013 – but to this day, no one can say for certain how many people perished in the aftermath of Typhoon Yolanda [also known as Haiyan]
.  Estimates on the number of casualties are as high as 7,000 with some 1,800 missing or presumed dead – which is not too far from the projection made by police chief superintendent Elmer Soria who was eventually sacked as Eastern Visayas regional head for saying the number of fatalities could reach 10,000.

No one could have predicted the kind of devastation that Yolanda would bring, with the super typhoon now having gained infamy as the strongest ever to hit not only the Philippines but the world – whose power was described by meteorologists as “off the charts,” and that its intensity could not be tracked or handled by widely used satellite intensity scales because it has approached the “theoretical maximum intensity for any storm, anywhere.”

As some experts have noted, no amount of preparation could have spared Eastern Visayas from the intensity of the super typhoon. This was particularly true with Tacloban City that was the hardest hit because its location put it in the middle of two bodies of water that hit it with towering waves as high as five meters brought about by the storm surge – the first one coming from the direction of the Pacific Ocean through Tacloban Bay, then the second one from Cancabato Bay.

Storms, typhoons, earthquakes and other natural calamities do not choose – they can hit any country regardless of economic stature, they do not distinguish  “names” nor political affiliation, neither religion nor social status. Devastating as they are, tragedies such as that wrought by super typhoon Yolanda can also bring out the best in people, seen in the way Filipinos banded together as they gave donations, volunteered time and effort to repack relief items and offered prayers for casualties as well as survivors. The response from the international community was – for lack of a better word – overwhelming, with help still pouring in until this very day to speed up the rehabilitation of the areas that were damaged....

Typhoon Haiyan viewed from the International Space Station, November 9, 2013

Rivers recover natural conditions quickly following dam removal

Oregon State University News and Research Communications: A study of the removal of two dams in Oregon suggests that rivers can return surprisingly fast to a condition close to their natural state, both physically and biologically, and that the biological recovery might outpace the physical recovery.

The analysis, published by researchers from Oregon State University in the journal PLOS One, examined portions of two rivers – the Calapooia River and Rogue River. It illustrated how rapidly rivers can recover, both from the long-term impact of the dam and from the short-term impact of releasing stored sediment when the dam is removed.

Most dams have decades of accumulated sediment behind them, and a primary concern has been whether the sudden release of all that sediment could cause significant damage to river ecology or infrastructure. However, this study concluded that the continued presence of a dam on the river constituted more of a sustained and significant alteration of riv
er status than did the sediment pulse caused by dam removal.

“The processes of ecological and physical recovery of river systems following dam removal are important, because thousands of dams are being removed all over the world,” said Desirée Tullos, an associate professor in the OSU Department of Biological and Ecological Engineering.

“Dams are a significant element in our nation’s aging infrastructure,” she said. “In many cases, the dams haven’t been adequately maintained and they are literally falling apart. Depending on the benefits provided by the dam, it’s often cheaper to remove them than to repair them.”...

The remains of the Savage Rapids Dam on the Rogue River in Oregon, shot by Finetooth, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Helping Tanzanian families build their resilience in the aftermath of a disaster

Sheila Chemjor in AllAfrica.com via the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies: Families in Morogoro's Dakawa and Kilosa area, 270 kilometres northwest of Tanzania's capital Dar es Salaam, are rebuilding their lives following flash floods that left a massive trail of destruction earlier in the year, affecting at least 10,000 people. It is the first time since the 1970s that they had experienced such heavy rainfall and as such were completely unprepared. Some houses were washed away leaving no trace of their existence.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) allocated 180,676 Swiss francs from its Disaster Relief Emergency Fund to help the Tanzania Red Cross Society in assisting 2,000 people affected by the floods. With the help of the Red Cross, families have now constructed shelters at a temporary site allocated to them by the Government of Tanzania, as they wait to be settled permanently on safer grounds.

As part of the emergency operation, Tanzania Red Cross Society volunteers carried out hygiene promotion to prevent an outbreak of diseases, and provided water and sanitation facilities and shelter materials. They also offered psychosocial support.

With agriculture as their main source of livelihoods, the community was hard pressed as their farms were completely destroyed. Not wanting to wallow in pity, they started to plough the land around their settlements, planting maize, beans and indigenous vegetables to avoid relying on food aid. Others went back to their original homes to plant their crops on their farms while they continue to live in the settlement....

A flood in Dar es Salaam, shot by Muddyb Blast Producer, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

The causal effect of environmental catastrophe on long-run economic growth: Evidence from 6,700 cyclones

An abstract at the National Bureau of Economic Research: Does the environment have a causal effect on economic development? Using meteorological data, we reconstruct every country's exposure to the universe of tropical cyclones during 1950-2008. We exploit random within-country year-to-year variation in cyclone strikes to identify the causal effect of environmental disasters on long-run growth. We compare each country's growth rate to itself in the years immediately before and after exposure, accounting for the distribution of cyclones in preceding years.

The data reject hypotheses that disasters stimulate growth or that short-run losses disappear following migrations or transfers of wealth. Instead, we find robust evidence that national incomes decline, relative to their pre-disaster trend, and do not recover within twenty years. Both rich and poor countries exhibit this response, with losses magnified in countries with less historical cyclone experience. Income losses arise from a small but persistent suppression of annual growth rates spread across the fifteen years following disaster, generating large and significant cumulative effects: a 90th percentile event reduces per capita incomes by 7.4% two decades later, effectively undoing 3.7 years of average development.

The gradual nature of these losses render them inconspicuous to a casual observer, however simulations indicate that they have dramatic influence over the long-run development of countries that are endowed with regular or continuous exposure to disaster. Link
ing these results to projections of future cyclone activity, we estimate that under conservative discounting assumptions the present discounted cost of "business as usual" climate change is roughly $9.7 trillion larger than previously thought.

A Florida house crushed by trees, after Katrina in 2005. A FEMA photo

Lacking statewide strategy, New Jersey shore towns prepare for climate change

Carolyn Beeler at Newsworks.org: Hurricane Sandy was a harsh wake-up call for Jersey shore communities, a reminder of their vulnerability in the face of predicted sea-level rise, more intense storms and increasingly frequent coastal flooding.

Now that post-storm cleanup and rebuilding is slowing, New Jersey shore communities, aided by non-profits and academic centers, are developing comprehensive resiliency plans to better prepare for the longer-term challenges of climate change.

...With immediate repairs now over, Tuckerton and many other municipalities are beginning to grapple with planning for a much longer-term challenge: sea-level rise. Rutgers researchers project sea level will rise between 13 to 28 inches by 2050, while New Jersey itself gradually sinks.

...The Borough of Tuckerton joined with surrounding Little Egg Harbor Township for Sandy cleanup and resiliency planning. Still, administrator Jenny Gleghorn said it feels like a tiny town facing a huge challenge. "If the state of New Jersey would just say, 'This is the type of thing that you need to do, and here's some funding to help that out,' I think a lot of towns would benefit from that," Gleghorn said. "We can't be the only towns that are in this situation."

....Still, floodplain manager John Miller and some of the most vocal environmental groups in the state see the rule change as a missed opportunity to incorporate lessons learned from Sandy into coastal land use policy. In the face of rising seas, he argues putting more people in low-lying areas near the coast will make it harder to evacuate them, or reach them with emergency services....

Hurricane Sandy eats a rollercoaster in New Jersey, New Jersey National Guard photo

The lingering pain of Nigerian flooding

Ola Ajayi in AllAfrica.com via the Vanguard (Nigeria): While some survivors of the flood disaster recorded in some parts of Ibadan metropolis are trying to put the incident behind them, others are yet to come to terms with the painful reality of the incident where a make-shift bridge collapsed and emptied those on it into the raging flood.

While it is true that the State Government has reconstructed the collapsed bridge and also provided free transportation system for residents of the area, those affected are still nursing the scars of that disaster, saying that the experience was still fresh and too painful for them to forget in a hurry.

Following claims by the state government that there was no casualty as reported in the media, Vanguard Metro, VM, tried to locate some of the relatives of the victims of the flood. It coincided with the day that Senator Olufemi Lanlehin who represents the Oyo South visited the residents and gave them items to reduce their trauma.

Some of those interviewed were furious and said it was unfair to say there were no casualties at Apete where they claimed they saw many people being swept away by the flood. To get the truth of the matter, VM accosted one of the students of The Polytechnic Ibadan who then volunteered to lead the correspondent to the children of one of the dead victims, the late Kamoli Jimoh, a father of seven children....

Pakistan flood victims await unfulfilled promises

IRIN: Four and a half years after a landslide and subsequent flooding in northern Pakistan’s Gilgit-Baltistan State killed 19 people and displaced around 25,000, a solution to the plight of local residents seems as far off as ever.

The area that used to house a handful of bustling communities is a 22km-long pool of water dubbed Attabad Lake. Looking out from its banks, the shells of dozens of homes rise up from the blue-green waters.

In the aftermath of this disaster in the Hunza Valley, there were immediate commitments by the Pakistani authorities that they would drain the area and resettle the displaced families in new territory, but residents say nothing has happened, that compensation has been inadequate, and that the government is prioritizing the rebuilding of a nearby highway to China. Many of those who protested have been thrown in jail, with some awaiting trial in special anti-terrorism courts on charges of arson and sedition.

The warning signs of the landslide had been noticeable for several months before the day of the crash, said Sahib Jan, a programme officer with Focus Humanitarian Assistance (FOCUS), an international group of agencies affiliated with the Aga Khan Development Network. Three months before the slide, they realized a crisis was coming. “We literally dragged people out of their homes, telling them their lives were in danger,” recalled Jan.

In the end the slide was more devastating than anyone had feared. "We evacuated several other villages, up to 100km downstream, out of fear the earthen dam created by the landslide would burst,” Jan added....

The Hunza Valley, shot by Yasin Chaudhry, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

Business boost needed to sustain Philippines post-Haiyan recovery

IRIN: Progress made during recovery stages after the November 2013 Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines could be undermined without job creation strategies to secure stability beyond short-term livelihood projects, warn aid agencies and government officials.

“We have moved on from life-saving food assistance - critical at the onset of any emergency. We need to focus on livelihood creation that will ensure food security in the long term,” said Dipayan Bhattacharyya, in charge of food security for the UN World Food Programme in the Philippines.

“People are clamouring for two things: jobs and shelter,” said Fe Kagahistian, cash coordinator for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Manila.

“Typhoon survivors now need jobs that will go beyond short-term cash for work programmes. They need jobs that will allow them to provide for their basic needs with a little extra to save for the future,” she said.

Alarm over post-Haiyan evacuation centre shortage

IRIN: A shortage of viable evacuation centres in areas hit by Typhoon Haiyan (locally named Yolanda) has humanitarians and officials in the Philippines concerned that survivors will not have alternative accommodation in case of another one. The typhoon season usually lasts from June to November.

“We urgently need to identify alternative evacuation centres,” said Conrad Navidad, emergency preparedness and response coordinator for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), a global humanitarian agency.

Haiyan, the category 5 super-typhoon that barrelled through central Philippines in November 2013, damaged or destroyed more than one million homes across an area roughly the size of Portugal, affecting more than five million people.

An IOM survey in 10 of the most affected towns in Eastern Samar and Samar, the two provinces hardest-hit by Haiyan, showed that only 53 of the 634 of pre-Haiyan evacuation centres identified by the government could be used in the event of another typhoon.

An estimated three million people have received emergency shelter assistance in the form of tents and tarpaulins, while about 675,000 received building and roofing materials to rebuild their own homes....

Eastern Samar Province, Republic of the Philippines (Nov. 15, 2013) A Filipino marine stands guard at the village of Guiuan in the aftermath of Super Typhoon Haiyan.

Flood damage to Bosnia estimated at 2 billion euros

Terra Daily via AFP: Bosnia's record floods in May have caused damage estimated at two billion euros ($2.7 billion), seriously affecting the country's economy, an international expert group said on Wednesday.

The cost is equivalent to some 15 percent of Bosnia's 2013 gross domestic product (GDP) and will cause the economy to contract by 1.1 percent this year, compared to the growth of 2.2 percent that had been predicted before the floods, they said.

The estimates were made by experts from the EU, United Nations and World Bank along with local authorities.

It is only an "initial overall assessment of recovery needs" and "more verification work is needed" over the coming fortnight to provide more detailed numbers by sector, said a spokesman of the EU Delegation to Bosnia, Andy McGuffie. An initial estimate by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) in late May had put the damage at around 1.3 billion euros ($1.8 billion)....

May 2014 flooding in Bosnia, shot by Dalibor Platenik - Dali, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license 

After the floods, questions for Balkan governments

Ivana Sekularac in Reuters: Pavle Pavlovic never heard the flood siren at 5 a.m. on Friday, May 16, when the waters of the nearby Kolubara River had already entered the Serbian town of Obrenovac. The 37-year-old power plant worker woke three hours later to find his street submerged. Like thousands of others, he was trapped.

"There was no warning that our neighbourhood could be flooded," Pavlovic said days later at a Belgrade sports hall that had become his temporary home. "Luckily we had some water and a loaf of bread in the apartment." Rescue boats reached his part of town two days later.

Now Serbians and Bosnians are asking why so little was done to protect lives and defend homes when meteorologists had given several days' notice of torrential rain in an area notoriously prone to flooding. They are also asking why online content critical of the government's response to the floods has disappeared.

At least 40 people died in Obrenovac after the skies dumped several months worth of rain on the Balkans in a few days. The toll has climbed to 65 in total in Serbia and Bosnia.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development estimates the damage in Serbia at up to 2 billion euros ($2.73 billion), or seven percent of national output, and 1.3 billion euros in Bosnia, or 10 percent of output....

2014 floods in Serbia, Kostajnik near Krupanj, shot by Danijela Vasić, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons 3.0 license 

Philippines still rebuilding six months after typhoon’s visit

IRIN: More than six months after Typhoon Haiyan devastated large parts of the central Philippines, progress is being made in rebuilding livelihoods. However, huge challenges remain in making them sustainable.

“What we need now is to intensify emergency employment efforts on the ground and transition into sustainable livelihood programmes,” Ruth Honculada-Georget, early recovery and livelihood co-coordinator for the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Manila, told IRIN, describing their work ahead as “enormous”.

According to a May report by the Geneva-based Internal Displacement and Monitoring Centre, progress on sustainable solutions for survivors remains key to the recovery and resilience of those affected by the Category 5 storm which slammed into the region on 8 November 2013 displacing more than 4 million people and leaving over 6,000 dead.

Of the 14 million affected, 5.9 million workers lost their sources of income and livelihoods, of which 60 percent were men and 40 percent were women, the Early Recovery and Livelihoods Cluster (ER&L – made up of more than 50 international and local NGOs and co-led by the government, ILO, and the UN Development Programme) reported on 14 May.

More than 2.6 million of those affected were already living below the poverty line or were in vulnerable forms of employment before the typhoon, including the agriculture, fishing and forestry sectors, or a combination of all three.

Wind and powerful storm surges destroyed or damaged key assets and disrupted livelihood activities resulting in income losses of up to 70 percent across the region, the Multi-Cluster/ Sector Rapid Assessment (MIRA II), a cooperative effort involving more than 40 agencies working in the nine affected regions, revealed....

Post-Haiyan devastation in Tacloban, Philippines, shot by DFID - UK Department for International Development, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons 2.0 license

European Space Agency's Sentinel-1 satellite aids Balkan flood relief

A press release from the European Space Agency: Although not yet operational, the new Sentinel-1A satellite has provided radar data for mapping the floods in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Heavy rainfall leading to widespread flooding and landslides has hit large parts of the Balkans, killing dozens of people and leaving hundreds of thousands displaced.

Jan Kucera of the Europan Commission’s Joint Research Centre is supervising the technical aspect of the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (EMS). While mapping the flooding in northeastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, ESA delivered a radar scan from Sentinel-1A: “I had a first look and discovered that we were missing an important flooded area visible in the middle of the image.”

Although the radar on Sentinel-1A is still being calibrated, the new information could be integrated into the Copernicus EMS flood maps of the Sava river in the Balatun area in Bosnia and Herzegovina. “In emergency situations like these, it is important that we optimise all the available data to produce better maps for disaster relief efforts.”

The radar on Sentinel-1 is able to ‘see’ through clouds, rain and in darkness, making it particularly useful for monitoring floods. Images acquired before and after a flood offer immediate information on the extent of inundation and support assessments of property and environmental damage.

Sentinel-1A was launched on 3 April, and is the first in a fleet of Sentinel satellites developed for Europe’s Copernicus environment monitoring programme....

Flood delineation map over the village of Balatun in northeastern Bosnia and Herzegovina based on Sentinel-1A data. Serbia lies to the north of the Sava river. Copyright held by ESA/European Commission