Next Move 4\Fighting the cyclones.

Fighting the cyclones

Every year, natural disasters affect about 250 million people and global warming is making droughts, floods and avalanches more common. Sadly, we can’t stop the disasters, but we can reduce the number of people who die in them.

In Bangladesh, a lot of people have to live on flat land near the sea, but the cyclones there bring terrible floods. In 1970, Cyclone Bhola killed about 500,000 people. A .... In 1991, the even stronger Cyclone Gorky hit the country. This time, people could use special school buildings as emergency shelters. Unfortunately, many women and children didn’t go to them and around 140,000 people drowned.

After this, villages set up groups of emergency volunteers and teachers had to talk to children every week about the things which they should do if there was a cyclone warning.

They didn’t have to wait many years for the next big cyclone. B .... Twelve hours before Cyclone Sidr reached land, a Bangladeshi scientist in the USA calculated the exact areas of danger on a computer. The emergency volunteers in the villages spread the warning fast.

Ten-year-old Rupa Begum and her friends ran to all their neighbours’ homes. C .... ‘You won’t be safe if you stay here.’ All the buildings in the village were destroyed in the cyclone except for the school shelter. But because of the children’s warnings, everyone in the village survived.

D .... Four thousand people died in Cyclone Sidr. But this was a much smaller number than in the big cyclones of the twentieth century. With modern technology, planning and education, we don’t have to lose huge numbers of lives in natural disasters.