Problems of disaster management Essay

Prediction, warning, and evacuation systems that depend on refined technology and extremely effective public bureaucracies are above all open to question. In addition, disasters hold features that have not been common in smaller communities and that might raise completely new problems of disaster management. For instance disaster impacts that control mass media markets are probable to be extensively, incessantly, and obsessively reported whereas impacts on other communities that have less right to use to these channels are likely to be ignored. The consequences for skewing post-disaster assistance are considerable. Secondly, the multifarious societal mixes pose new problems for the delivery of emergency response services and disaster relief; linguistic, ethnic, and other divergences are often marked in such places. Thirdly, the sheer size and complication of infrastructure networks make them predominantly liable to distraction. Finally, recovery is apt to transpire more slowly than in smaller places. In short, past lessons of disaster management might no longer be applicable in the cities of the polycentric. Certainly, the majority of the world’s big cities are not part of the polycentric. Instead they serve as primary contact points linking the polycentre and regional or local markets on the global periphery. Tijuana (Mexico) is a good instance. Once a small regional town, it is now the fourth-largest city in Mexico with a populace of well over 1 million. Tijuana’s recent growth has been fuelled by investments of multinational corporations in maquiladora firms near the US border. As more shanty towns group in the steep semi-arid valleys of the city edge and more people crowd into the waterside lowlands, the incidence and harshness of floods and landslides in Tijuana are also speeding up. In places such as Manila, Dhaka, Ankara, or Lima there is the prospective for heavy loss of life during disasters as well as appalling material destruction. The situation in Lima is typical. This is a city that has endured severe earthquakes as a minimum five times in the past three hundred years. At the end of the Second World War, just over half a million people lived in the metropolitan area. these days, there are more than five million. Vast numbers of poor rural peasants have infested into Lima. Not all groups are equally exposed to hazard. Certainly, the pattern of hazard-susceptibility is a complex one that has developed in response to changes in demography, economics, land ownership, building practices, and other features. Read more:Â  Sharing Responsibility During Disaster Management Middle and upper-income groups live in well-constructed houses that often conform to antiseismic codes and are sited in neighbourhoods with broad streets and ample open spaces. If distressed by an earthquake there are enough resources to make certain quick recovery. The marginal shanty towns (pueblos jovenes) are also low-density settlements, this time poised of light bamboo structures that do not disintegrate when the ground moves. People are poor, but stages of social organization are high. On the contrary, seismic susceptibility is high in the inner-city slum areas. Here numerous poor families are crowded into old adobe brick structures, adjacent streets are narrow, and open spaces are non-existent. There are few neighbourhood organizations or other local institutes that might be called on in the event of a disaster. Here earthquake protection measures are nominal or, more often, non-existent. As summarized by one observer, the situation is full of desolate prospects: The population of critical areas would not choose to live there if they had any substitute, nor do they neglect the maintenance of their stuffed and deteriorated tenements. For them it is the best-of-the-worst of a number of disaster-prone situations such as having nowhere to live, having no way of earning a living and having not anything to eat. Given that these other risks have to be faced on a daily basis, it is hardly surprising that people give little precedence to the risk of destruction by earthquake. (Maskrey, 1989, p. 12) In summary, there is a high extent of uncertainty about the future of cities. Their growth seems certain, but at what density? New ones might spring up in unexpected places under the influence of changing geo-economics’ forces.ever more similar in outward form, cities in diverse cultures and continents may still hold peculiarly different internal structures. The divisions between rich cities and poor ones might become wider and their disaster receptiveness may also diverge. But, at the similar time, the differences between all cities and their rural hinterlands might become sharper. It would be reckless to assume that the disaster-susceptibility of any one city will be quite like that of any other. This is an era of great urban instability; it bears close examination of hazards and disasters.