Peoples' Perception and Response to Floodings: The Bangladesh Experience

Abstract

Bangladesh, a test case of disaster management, has been continuously internalizing lessons learned by the people, the bureaucracy and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), after successfully responding to major natural disasters, particularly floods. The unprecedented flood of 1988 was a great educator to almost all stakeholders in Bangladesh. Since then, it has improved its capacity to cope with disasters despite some failures in its management of the macro-economy and governance. Credit goes mostly to the ordinary people whose resilience and creativity during and after disasters have been quite heroic. This paper makes an attempt at documenting peoples' perception and response to major floods at different stages of the crisis. An illustrative plan for coping with flood disasters encompassing these stages has also been designed and outlined in this paper.We normally recognize English-educated elites as our own people. We never can think of the fact that we are nowhere unless we take the ordinary people as our parts and parcels. We are creating a formidable gap between us and the mass. We have always kept them outside the domain of our discourse (Tagore, 1986: 629).

Multi-agency operations: Cooperation during flooding

“…In order to meet the demands of an exceptional incident, conventional rules that are enshrined in Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) had to be circumvented or 'broken'. Whilst this is not a new finding (see Auf der Heide, 1989;Smith and Dowell, 2000), this study has shown that such adaptations can result in problems, such as misunderstandings with other agencies which can jeopardize the incident response. Mendonça et al (2007) also note that both organisational and individual level improvisation demand high levels of communication.…”

“…Despite these drawbacks, it is felt that the case study presented here provides a useful description of the problems associated with multi-agency response work. Additionally, the method adopted for this study closely resembles that of Smith and Dowell's (2000) investigation of a railway accident.…”

“…Major emergencies typically feature high levels of complexity and ambiguity. Recognizing that large-scale emergencies occur with little or no notice, involve temporary organisations of agencies who rarely (if ever) work together and improvised organisational structures (Smith and Dowell, 2000), effective management of major emergencies would appear to be an impossible task (Boin and T'Hart, 2003). Major emergencies have been defined in terms of their "un-ness", i.e.…”

“…Additionally, military resources and logistical capabilities were invaluable in the immediate aftermath of the South Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, though in both instances there was a failure to fully integrate the military into the response, which reduced their effectiveness (Bennett et al, 2006;Chua et al, 2007;Telford, 2007). Case studies of earlier floods reveal similar evaluations; for example, Rahman (1996) found that there was a lack of coordination of the response to the 1988 floods in Bangladesh, including a lack of trust of NGOs by local administrators, resulting in their exclusion from planning programs (Rahman, 1996). In summary, there are eleven broad issues that these studies raise:…”

Flood-Hazard Mapping in a Regional Scale – Way Forward to the Future Hazard Atlas in Bangladesh

“…Physiographically, landmass of Bangladesh exhibits flood plains that renders the nation at risk of periodic flooding. Three mighty rivers, the Brahmaputra, Ganges and Meghna and their tributaries and distributaries contribute to the genesis of flood plain in their respective catchment areas and floods of varying magnitude occur on a regular basis due to low elevated flood plains within these catchments [8][9][10][11]. In the last 100 years, floods resulted over 50,000 people deaths, left nearly 32 million homeless and affected more than 300 million people in Bangladesh [12].…”