Week­end events gave us another exam­ple of a poor nation who has trou­ble tak­ing pre­ven­ta­tive mea­sures against nat­ural dis­as­ters. Instead, when the dis­as­ter hap­pens, it spends all of it’s resources clean­ing up the dam­age. It becomes a cycli­cal pat­tern that a coun­try is unable to stop.

El Sal­vador suf­fered severe flood­ing over the week­end. Down­pours of rain caused giant mud­slides. The death toll from the flood­ing now stands at 130. In addi­tion, 7,500 peo­ple are with­out homes.

From the IPS, writer Edgardo Ayala explains the poor warn­ing sys­tems that need to be upgraded.

Envi­ron­men­tal­ist Ángel Ibarra, pres­i­dent of the Unidad Ecológ­ica Sal­vadoreña (Sal­vado­ran Eco­log­i­cal Unit, or UNES), cited a World Bank study which esti­mates that 90 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion lives in areas at high rel­a­tive risk of death from two or more nat­ural hazards.

But Ibarra said the prob­lem of nat­ural dis­as­ters is mag­ni­fied in the coun­try because of the seri­ous envi­ron­men­tal dete­ri­o­ra­tion on one hand, and the lack of poli­cies to pull peo­ple out of poverty and social exclu­sion on the other.

Most of the vic­tims of cat­a­stro­phes like flood­ing and mud­slides are poor peo­ple who live in shacks in dan­ger­ous areas along river­banks or hillsides.

He also told IPS that El Sal­vador lacks ade­quate dis­as­ter pre­ven­tion and pre­pared­ness poli­cies. “When these prob­lems hap­pen, it’s always as if it were the first time. We have a ‘pick­ing up the dead’ pol­icy. We only react after some­thing happens.”

So although El Sal­vador, located on the earthquake-prone Ring of Fire and in the path of hur­ri­canes, fre­quently suf­fers nat­ural dis­as­ters, fol­lowed up by reports call­ing for an improved early warn­ing sys­tem and other pre­ven­tion mea­sures, the sys­tem rarely func­tions when it is needed.

“We also suf­fer from socio-environmental and insti­tu­tional vul­ner­a­bil­ity,” added Ibarra, point­ing to the dearth of coor­di­na­tion between the dif­fer­ent state agencies.

Start­ing last Wednes­day, the weather reports were fore­cast­ing heavy rain over the week­end, and the gov­ern­ment declared a “green alert.” But the alert was not upgraded to orange until late Sun­day morn­ing, when deaths had already been reported in sev­eral parts of the country.

The national mete­o­ro­log­i­cal ser­vice, SNET, fore­cast 100 mm of rain. But late Sat­ur­day night and early Sun­day morn­ing, 355 mm fell in just four hours – a down­pour even worse than the rain­fall that accom­pa­nied Hur­ri­cane Mitch in 1998, when 400 mm fell in four days.