Just like Haiti’s Port au Prince, large portions of Bangladesh’s major cities are liable to be washed away in some coastal, rain soaked incident. The throng of people in Chittagong live in cramped spaces, in rough hewn, corrugated, unconstructed huts in that hilly city, like millions others lived in Port au Prince. And like them, they could be waiting, heedlessly, needlessly for doom.
Torrential rains in Chittagong could cause a major landslide washing entire neighborhoods and districts. The good news is that government authorities have identified which areas are in danger of washing away. The same technical authority has estimated the number of people who are at risk of becoming casualties of a devastating landslide. The bad news is that the sitting government has done nothing to alert the people who could affected by a landslide. Indeed the government has done nothing to prevent or mitigate a landslide.
After a landslide in 2007 that killed 127 people and another less destructive one, in 2008 that killed 11 people the then care-taker government put together a technical committee headed by the chair of the Chittagong Development Authority. That body identified 50,000 people who could be at risk of losing hearth and home in a landslide that might strike during the rains. Of those 15,000 live at the base of 12 hills and those hills are ripe for a landslide after a punishing rain fall.
Though plans were made to plant trees and constructing retaining walls, they all fell apart because the people who lived in that area could not be moved safely, without incident. At least one planned move fell under the Army’s whim. Another simply fizzled out when it came across existing laws.
Therefore, the people at risk have not been moved. There seems little urgency outside the recent news of the landslide in Cox’s Bazaar, a coastal area, farther south of Chittagong. That the majority of the people who live at the base of those hills are self-employer and desperately poors, seems to not have made much difference in the central government’s drive to do nothing.
