Disaster management refers to strategically responding to a catastrophe, allocating emergency supplies to help the affected community to recover, and taking well-planned steps to mitigate the impacts and prepare for the next disaster. This bookish definition of disaster management includes four key phases -- mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery, and together they represent the "Disaster Management Cycle."
But do people care about this academic jargon when a sudden catastrophe strikes? When the existence of life gets threatened, making survival the one vital priority, humans rush for whatever their basic instincts trigger them to do. But even through all the chaos of a disaster time situation, sometimes specific individuals set examples of taking strategic steps, bringing unity among the affected, and building a line of defense for the rest of the community.
Such impressive precedents were set by Md Masum Billah (23) and Bhaskar Mondol (23) with their associated voluntary organizations, when 150 feet of polder embankment along the Kholpetua River collapsed, bringing havoc to the inhabitants of the Union of Burigoalini in Shyamnagar, Satkhira.
On July 14, 2022, at around 12 PM, 50 feet of the polder embankment in the Union of Burigoalini of Shyamnagar, Satkhira, Khulna adjacent to the Kholpetua River collapsed, endangering its inhabitants and their properties. During such pressing moments, instead of getting lost in the chaos, Bhaskar Mondol, a local youth leader, led his youth-led voluntary organization "Shawpna Rath" to the affected area and started to gather chunks of mud to mend the collapsed portion of the polder embankment. Their valiant effort inspired other voluntary organizations and created unity among the distressed. Their united "response" to the emergency provided a fighting chance for the inhabitants to secure their valuables and move to safety.
But as the day advanced to the night, tidal activities started to affect the patched area of the polder embankment. The water of the Kholpetua River rose at an alarming rate as the lunar high tide kicked in. Around 11 PM, the violent tidal current washed away the patched-up portion of the polder embankment. As the night advanced to the next day, the diurnal-tidal cycle forced water from the Kholpetua River to rush inside the locality, extending the broken portion of the polder embankment to 150 feet by 11 AM of July 15, 2022, destroying the polder road, submerging acres of shrimp ponds, paddy fields, and homestead areas with brackish water.
The massive 150-feet-long damaged portion of the polder embankment was beyond the capacity of the inhabitants to fix. By August 16, 2022, the Water Development Board appointed contractors to fix the polder embankment, and lead the community to "recovery." But according to local informants, the contractors just piled up the necessary materials to reconstruct the polder embankment near the affected area, and did not bother to take any action on that day.
Witnessing such disorder, Bhaskar Mondol (23) and his team of youth volunteers responded immediately. On July 17, 2022, they, along with other voluntary organizations and general inhabitants, volunteered to build up the damaged portion of the embankment with the materials the constructors brought to the spot the other day.
Later, with the instructions from the appointed contractors, more than 1,000 local inhabitants, and youth volunteers together worked throughout the entire day and ended up mending almost 80% of the collapsed embankment, and by July 18, 2022, all the 150 feet of the collapsed embankment got temporarily fixed -- while more engineering works on it are still going on.
Throughout this entire ongoing period of “recovery,” Md Masum Billah (23), another resident of the region along with his youth-led voluntary organization “Sundarbans Students' Solidarity Team” distributed medicines and saline powder packs to almost 150 families of the affected regions to “mitigate” the impacts of the disaster. His organization also distributed sanitary napkins among many of the affected families as the necessities for such amenities are often ignored within the government-allotted relief materials.
To raise funds for these voluntary activities, he and the members of his organization donated their pocket money, raised money from the local political leaders, and received financial help from some of the students of the University of Khulna. With funding from the local government authorities, his organization helped to distribute lunch for the inhabitants who volunteered to mend the embankment. His organization also managed to allot funds for supplying 1,000 litres of potable drinking water to the affected families every day starting from July 17, 2022 and distributed and helped to set up rainwater harvesting polyethylene sheets in at least 25 families so far.
Throughout all the mentioned youth-led activities in managing such a disaster, one of the key phases of the disaster management cycle, “Preparedness” is missing. The community was not well prepared to respond strategically which made them vulnerable to such a disaster from the beginning. The polder embankment also has major engineering and quality-related flaws as the structure collapsed without the presence of any severe weather conditions.
The structure also was not built keeping the impacts of rising sea levels along the coastline of the Bay of Bengal into consideration. Sea-level rise, one of the most insidious impacts of climate change, contributes to making the lunar high tides gradually violent annually. But Burigoalini is blessed that it has youth leaders like Bhaskar Mondol and Md Masum Billah whose voluntary organizations managed to go through major phases of the disaster management cycle from the absolute grassroots level.
The liveliness of the youth along with the responsibility-seeking characteristics of the young adult minds are key elements of effective grassroots-level disaster management activities. Well-planned youth-focused development activities like long-term high-level training workshops, fieldwork, and drills to make potential youth leaders more coordinated, motivated, and strategically efficient will inherently increase the capacity of their communities to prepare and respond to a disaster appropriately, reducing their disaster vulnerabilities, and allowing them to be more proficient to progress faster through the recovery phase and mitigate the impacts of any disaster efficiently.
Md Tahseen Ahmed is working in the Environment and Climate Change Network of Youth Policy Forum as an Associate. His/her research interest lies in climate change impacts, disaster management, coastal zone management, and more. Can be reached at tahseen.email@gmail.com