In 2024, the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) recorded 393 natural hazard-related disasters. These events caused 16,753 fatalities and affected 167.2 million people. Economic losses totaled US$241.95 billion. The year 2024 was marked by extreme temperature events in Asia that caused thousands of deaths, severe droughts in Africa affecting over 25 …
first came the tsunami. Then the crocodiles. Many south Andaman villages have of late started complaining about frequent crocodile attacks. But the authorities are clueless about how to solve the problem. Residents of Wandoor and Hut Bay villages are a especially troubled lot. Tsunami waves have pushed crocodiles closer to …
tsunami Answerability: Sri Lanka's president Chandrika Kumaratunga has got an inquiry initiated into the government's failings in averting the destruction caused by the tsunami waves on December 26, 2004. She has appointed a retired Supreme Court judge to conduct the probe. The inquiry will try to find out if government …
nearly a month after the tsunami hit India's eastern coast, some districts of Andhra Pradesh are reporting incidents of water appearing in wells that had dried up long ago. The first such occurrence was sighted recently in Mukundapur village of Ranga Reddy district, where about 30 centimetre deep water seeped …
District hospital, Nagapattinam is just two kilometres (km) from the Bay of Bengal. On December 26, 2004, when the tsunami struck, the hospital's paediatric ward was swept away; there were no survivors. This hospital was our first call as volunteers in relief operations coordinated by the Chennai-based non-governmental organisation, Suyam: …
tsunami-hit Kerala is witnessing a hot debate on the effectiveness of sea walls. The state government has requested the Union government to provide it Rs 757 crore for reconstruction and rehabilitation work. A sizeable portion of this will be spent on sea wall construction off the coast at Kollam and …
the recent Supreme Court (sc) judgement on tree felling in Andaman and Nicobar islands has triggered a controversy. The court, revising its May 7, 2002, order, allowed tree felling in the islands for six months to help repair and build houses for Tsunami disaster victims (see
the battle seems lost even before it has begun. Sri Lanka, shaken by the recent tsunami disaster, is scrambling to put together an effective disaster management system. But lack of efficient institutions, inept bureaucracy and frequent political changes may lead all its efforts to a naught, experts warn. After all, …
India has entered Phase II of tackling the tsunami disaster. It is now readying to rebuild and rehabilitate the affected areas and develop disaster prevention and management systems. In the first week of January, the government appointed the Planning Commission as the nodal agency to coordinate, monitor and manage the …
Even as relief work continues in areas devastated by the tsunami, the corpus of the Prime Minister's National Relief Fund has quietly swelled to around Rs 500 crore. The money is said to be the largest corpus ever collected through the fund. This is just money that has been sent …
Searching through the rubble of his home for anything still whole, Laksmiah Poleh can see life's options quite clearly. He can give up and move his family back to their home state on the mainland and, if he's lucky, find work as a tenant farmer making Rs 1,700 a month. …
When the tsunami waves lashed the eastern coast, the Government of India seemed as much at sea as the people affected by the disaster. Information just did not move out of Delhi to the disaster areas. But more than a week later, the administration seems to have found its feet. …
The archipelago of the Andaman and Nicobar islands consists of 572 islands; 35 are known to be inhabited. These are home to five tribes. The Jarawas, Sentinelese and Onges are Negrito tribes. The Andamanese have ceased to be a tribe and a pure-blood Andamanese is a rarity. The remaining two …
On January 4, the government announced that 901 people died and 6,010 were missing in the tsunami that hit Andaman and Nicobar islands on December 26. That cannot even be a half-truth. Samir Acharya, secretary of the Society for Andaman and Nicobar Ecology, said that according to four Nicobarese tribal …
As Asia prepares to rebuild itself after the killer wave, it will take a lot more than just political bickering to prevent a similar situation from recurring The Tsunami that has caused havoc across several South Asian countries has taken a human toll of more than 125,000, a figure that …
This video explains measures Japan took to prevent natural disasters. The video discusses barriers, embankments, dams, early warning systems, satellites, standard building codes, etc. Education plays an important role in disaster reduction in the future. Initiatives like community walks and children contests are shown. The video ends by showing examples …
Sethusamudram Shipping Canal Project, when completed, will transform parts of the southern coromandal coast qualitatively. Since historical times, this portion of the coast (Palk Bay, Adam’s Bridge) is used only to fleets of small crafts involved in coastal trading and fishing. Sethu Canal will transform this into a coast that …
The fourth International Conference on Disaster Management is being reconvened following the success of the previous three meetings, held at Wessex Institute in the New Forest in 2009, the University of Central Florida in Orlando, USA in 2011 and A Coruña, Spain in 2013.This series of conferences originated with the …
