Tsunami wreckage huge but human impact greater

Tsunami wreckage huge but human impact greater

Michael Casey, Associated Press/Banda Aceh

There's enough tsunami trash in this Indonesian city to make a
three-story-high pile covering 30 football fields.

In Sri Lanka, the volume of waste dumped in lagoons and
waterways is more than twice what was generated by the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks, by UN estimate.

The environmental devastation in the worst-hit countries is
immense, yet experts say it pales in comparison with what humans
had already managed to inflict before the giant waves struck on
Dec. 26, 2004.

In the Maldives, many of the 1,100 islands are uninhabitable
because they are covered in trash, and wells that provided
drinking water for more than a quarter of the population are
contaminated.

A year after the tsunami tore across the Indian Ocean, the
signs of devastation are still everywhere.

The earthquake that caused the tsunami reshaped the landscape
of some Indonesian and Indian islands, lifting reefs out of the
water, eroding beaches and submerging coconut groves. The giant
waves caused ecological damage across Indian Ocean coastlines.

But the destruction was mostly localized and overall it pales
in comparison to years of rampant development and dynamite
fishing, experts say.

Authorities are grappling with how to dispose of the vast
volume of tsunami waste, some of it laced with oil, asbestos and
hazardous waste.

And experts fear rebuilding could contribute to illegal
logging, overfishing and unchecked coastal construction.

Huge quantities of waste

"All the tsunami countries, particular Indonesia, Sri Lanka
and the Maldives, have been faced with the massive problem of
debris and demolition waste," said Pasi Rinne of the UN
Environmental Program. "In the long term, unsafe disposal of
waste will cause further environmental damage."

The Dec. 26 tsunami devastated mostly rural, coastal
communities in 12 countries, killing at least 216,000 people and
leaving more than a million homeless.

The giant, fast-moving waves swept cars, fishing boats and
houses up to six kilometers inland. Entire fishing villages were
reduced to piles of bricks, corrugated tin and wood that together
with ocean mud and thousands of dead bodies formed mountains of
debris.

In Banda Aceh, the provincial capital of Aceh province, the
waters that raged through downtown gathered up to 10 million
cubic meters of waste, all but 15 percent of which washed out to
sea.

In Sri Lanka, some 2.7 million cubic meters of waste was
dumped mostly in lagoons and environmentally sensitive waterways,
the United Nations said.

The Sept. 11 attacks generated 1.2 million cubic meters of
waste, according to the United Nations.

"It was everywhere. The waste was in the streets. We had dead
bodies under houses and in ponds. We thought we were facing
severe public health problems," said Tim Walsh, head of the UN
Development Program's tsunami waste management operation in Aceh.

There were no epidemics, however, and Banda Aceh reopened its
main landfill within weeks of the tsunami. The UNDP started a
US$15 million recycling program using hundreds of survivors to
pluck wood and stone from the rubble to use in rebuilding, as
fuel and in furniture.

But the city's sewage treatment plant still isn't working,
forcing it to dump untreated waste into the ocean.

Nearly 50 tons of expired medications -- some of it donated
after the tsunami -- sit in a warehouse awaiting safe disposal,
and there are at least 32 unregulated dump sites containing leaky
oil drums, medical waste and asbestos-laced roof tops.

Illegal logging, overfishing likely to intensify

Sigli is typical of coastal towns along Indonesia's battered
coast. Its small dump is now half a kilometer long.

"Every day, the trucks come," said Siti Zakiah, whose house
now borders the site. "I have a baby and this dump concerns
me. ... I can't open my doors and windows because of the flies."

In the Maldives, salt and waste from septic tanks have
contaminated groundwater, while tainted debris is scattered
across the archipelago and poses a public health risk. "It is a
serious challenge," said Donna Chanda, head of the Canadian Red
Cross delegation that is running a $10 million waste management
program.

The government wants more international help. Waste disposal
has always been a problem on the small, low-lying islands, says
Mohamed Hussain Shareef, a government spokesman, but now it's
hampering reconstruction.

Not all the news is bad.

Mangroves emerged largely unscathed, and in Indonesia and
Thailand less than 20 percent of reefs were damaged, mostly by
debris that washed offshore, officials said.

Many farm fields swamped by seawater have recovered, and some
farmers in Indonesia are reporting increased rice, peanut and
vegetable crop yields.

But if coastal ecosystems came out relatively unscathed, it's
chiefly because they were already so badly denuded by human
activity that little was left for the waves to destroy.

"In general, the impact of the tsunami is a lot less than the
human impact," said Clive Wilkinson, of the Australian Institute
of Marine Science, who is preparing a report on the tsunami-hit
reefs.

One quarter of all mangroves in Asia have been destroyed by
human activity, while dynamite fishing has decimated many coral
reefs. Now the fear is that illegal logging and overfishing, long
the bane of the region's environment, will intensify.

Timber and coral for reconstruction, while the UN says fish
stocks could face collapse because donors are promising many more
boats than existed before the disaster and are offering to
industrialize what was mostly a subsidence business.

"The media gets terribly excited about storms, tsunamis and
oil spills where in fact the slow, chronic stuff is more damaging
-- overfishing, sediment flows and development," Wilkinson said.
Jerker Tamelander, a Sri Lanka-based World Conservation Union
worker, says so much rebuilding is bound to have a serious
environmental effect.

"The actual implications of that," he warns, "will last for
decades."

GetAP 1.00 -- DEC 15, 2005 07:22:32