发自波士顿 2008-05-28 18:51:34 来源:南方周末专稿
英文版——
Earthquake lessons
Peter Walker
Earthquakes occupy a special foreboding place in the family of disasters that afflict man. They are cataclysmic, they make no differentiation between rich and poor, political elite or worker, old or young. They also demonstrate that, despite the way our different countries have developed, the cultures and the histories of nations, people, when caught in such crises, behave in utterly similar ways.
The grief on the face of a mother in Sichuan province today, is no different from that of the mother in Bam, Iran in 2003, or Izmit, Turkey in 1999, Kobe, Japan in 1995, San Francisco in 1989 or Spitak in Armenia in 1988. In all these earthquakes we saw the heroism on local people digging through the night to help rescue trapped loved ones, and the dedication to duty of local officials who, despite loosing their own families, stayed in place to direct relief efforts. When all said and done, we have more that unites us than separates us.
Also, in these past decades we have learned much about how best to respond to earthquakes and, as importantly, what not to do. Here are some of the key lessons from previous earthquake relief and rehabilitation operations.
Search and Rescue
People do not survive long trapped in collapsed buildings, particularly those built of concrete. The basic rule is that 95% of all those who will be rescued alive will be rescued in the first 48 hours. After that, loss of blood, toxins released by damaged tissue and dehydration will have killed most trapped people. This means that search and rescue teams need to be on the ground within hours of the quake striking. International search and rescue teams may be great gestures of solidarity and shared concern but they have little chance of getting to the disaster site in time to do any real good.
Hospital services
Earthquakes place a massive rapid load on the emergency facilities of hospitals. Beds blood, surgery teams. In countries where the hospital service are centrally organized, either through the state or, in the case of Japan, through the Red Cross, coordinating the flow of casualties from the quakes sites to the various medical facilities and keeping track of who went where, is handled far quicker and more effectively than in privatized systems where each hospital operates independently.
Volunteers
After every recent major televised earthquake, local volunteers have poured into the quake area to help. These numbers are always high if the quake takes place during one of the university and school vacation times when students are quick to volunteer. States that have ready structures for organizing this flow of sympathy fare better than those where volunteers are not organized.
Water and Sanitation
People die fastest from dehydration and through infectious disease spread in unsanitary conditions. Getting a clean water supply up and running has always got to be the priority. Most well fed people can go quite a few days without food and although earthquake damage infrastructure and storage facilities for the most part they do not damage food production. Once transportation routes can be reopened, food can be brought in. But water normally comes to people’s houses and apartments in pipes, now damaged beyond use, so alternative systems of tankers, mobile tanks and water stations need to be installed.
Fear
Earthquakes are truly terrifying events. In the immediate days after the quake people need reassurance and a constant flow of information. Often panic can set in around rumors. Rumors that an epidemic has broken out, or that another earthquake is predicted or that the local dams are going to burst and flood the town. Authorities need to be more open and more rapid in sharing information than they normally would, in order to reassure the population.
Cell phone networks have proved invaluable for this, particularly the use of text message broadcasting. Text messages take up very little band width and can get through with little signal strength and to hones which are running low on power.
Shelter
There is no such thing as temporary shelter! Experience after every major earthquake shows that where temporary housing is provided, much of it is still there and used years after the earthquake. In Kobe, Japan, authorities put up temporary housing in areas around the city and moved out people who had lost their homes. Three years later, people were still living in some of them. Those left in temporary housing tend to be those that have the hardest time coping. In the case of Japan, this was people who suffered from mental illness, and elderly people who had no immediate family to look after them. So temporary housing in the form of tents and mass accommodation in public buildings works in the short term. This should be replaced by housing which is meant to be permanent, not by some interim measure.
The second lesson, from all earthquakes is that people want to move back to their homes. They do not want to be relocated and do not want to see outsiders come in and redevelop their villages and communities. In some countries, planning authorities see the destruction of the earthquake as a chance to “wipe the slate clean”, to assume they can bulldoze the debris aside and take the opportunity to redevelop. Everywhere this has happened, those who suffered most in the earthquake have lost out. Where the affected community is deeply involved in the rebuilding process and gets to rebuild what they believe is right, the solution tends to be more durable and economically more sustainable in the long run.
Preparedness and mitigation
In the aftermath of every earthquake that has hit a rapidly developing city or town, it is found that local buildings and developers have cut corners and not built to the correct earthquake building codes. This is especially true for public buildings. A key lesson is that short term savings in construction costs lead to long term consequences in terms of loss of life, livelihoods and economic prosperity. In all cases authorities have needed to revise the way they police and administer building codes, usually becoming much stricter and introducing much harsher penalties for code violations.
At the household and social level, preparedness is often about behavior patterns. What history shows us is that in communities where earthquake preparedness and mitigation is practiced, losses are much lower. History also shows us that in communities where minor earthquakes are common, preparedness and mitigation is taken seriously but in communities where earthquakes are a risk but uncommon, preparedness and mitigation are easily forgotten. As an example, Tokyo suffers regularly from small tremors and earthquakes. Most people in Tokyo have earthquake insurance. Most people have bolted their furniture to the walls and their TVs to the tables, most people regular partake in earthquake evacuation drills. In Kobe, before the 1995 earthquake, very few people practiced these measures. Both are earthquake prone areas, but Kobe had not had a major earthquake in a generation.
Crises usually bring out the best in people. There is great suffering, but it is shared and the burden thus lessened. There are opportunities to rebuild to better standards, opportunities to retro-fit old buildings, particularly public buildings, to withstand the next shock, and opportunities to put in place preparedness measures to guard against future quakes. Where the authorities are invested in ensuring the safety and future of the population, the mistakes of the past can be learned from and a hopeful future created. Cities and people can live with earthquakes and can guard against them, but it takes long term investment, in infrastructure, research and people.
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