Haiyan: A Disaster Made Worse By Greed

[marmar]

from truthdig:


Haiyan: A Disaster Made Worse By Greed

Posted on Nov 14, 2013
By Sonali Kolhatkar


While the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report is 95 percent confident that global warming is caused by human activity (there are very few areas of active research in which scientists are so confident), what falls out of the scope of the report is which humans are responsible. The Philippines, which is one of the poorest and least developed nations on the planet, has had little hand in creating the conditions that nurtured Typhoon Haiyan (or Yolanda, as it’s known locally), possibly the worst storm in recorded human history.

“It’s just shocking. We’ve never seen anything like this before,” Alex Montances said to me of Haiyan, which made landfall in the Philippines on Nov. 8. Montances is the Southern California regional coordinator for the National Alliance for Filipino Concerns and for him, the storm literally hit close to home. Montances’ mother is from Tacloban in the province of Leyte, the hardest-hit area that was already suffering from the twin effects of poverty and environmentally destructive mining operations.

People and infrastructure have been washed away, children have been orphaned, families have been separated, homes have been flattened and, as of this writing, heavy rainfall was still hampering the survivors’ ability to regroup, rescue others and simply live another day. The numbers are staggering. Nearly 10 million people are affected—about a tenth of the entire population of the Philippines. As many as 800,000 people have been displaced. Leyte’s provincial governor estimated that 10,000 people were dead, and while it is still too early to account for all the fatalities, even the current official count of 2,300 is horrifically high.

........(snip)........

What is happening in the Philippines is a portent for poor nations of the world. Tacloban is witnessing a deadly intersection of abject poverty, a local environment stripped of its natural resources, and a storm intensified to catastrophic proportions by global warming. Montances told me, “There is so much poverty and so many American and Canadian corporations are logging and mining in many areas of the Philippines, including Leyte, Mindanao and other places that were hit recently. When there aren’t any trees and the vegetation is taken away and there’s huge open-pit mining, the water has nowhere to go when (there) are typhoons and so it floods into the coastal towns like Tacloban. It just exacerbates the damage, and destruction, and the casualties.” .....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/haiyan_a_disaster_made_worse_by_greed_20131114

[malaise]

1. And now here comes the armies to help

reshape what's left for foreign corporations

It will only get worse.

[seveneyes]

2. water has nowhere to go?

I'm hoping someone can clarify what this is try to say and what are the mechanics behind it.

"When there aren’t any trees and the vegetation is taken away and there’s huge open-pit mining, the water has nowhere to go when (there) are typhoons and so it floods into the coastal towns like Tacloban."

Of course when trees and vegetation are stripped on sloping land, erosion is exacerbated, but that does not apply in this case. In fact, if there were "huge open pits", then excess water *would* have somewhere to go. So what, exactly, is being eluded to here in reference to "the water has nowhere to go"?