Environmental degradation and how we are all vulnerable

Eleven years ago on Sunday, September 28, 2003, the Italian people experienced a devastating shock: At 3a.m, Italian local time, somewhere near the Swiss Alps, a tree, uprooted by strong winds, fell on a power line. And within 30 or so minutes, Italy and its 57 million inhabitants found out, as the Guardian Newspaper put it, “the first time what it was to be collectively powerless”. During the course of the day, it was established that tens of thousands of people were left stranded on trains, planes were grounded across the country, traffic lights were out of action, and hospitals forced to operate under emergency conditions. The question on everyone’s lips was: ‘How could this have happened to us?’ Like it had been the case with the American blackout several weeks earlier, the answers to this question sparked a round of buck passing that witnessed the blame bouncing between Swiss, Italian and French power authorities. By evening of Sunday, September 28, one theory seemed more plausible than others: The suggestion from Atel, one of Swiss’s biggest electricity providers, was that a large tree had fallen and knocked out a 380-kilovolt Swiss transmission line taking power over the Alps to Italy. The massive power cut brought Italy then on its knees, with 110 trains ground to a halt, 30,000 travelers going nowhere and sores lifts stuck. It was reported that in Rome alone, thousands of people had to sleep in the underground stations. TV stations and telephones went dead. Cars were trapped in electronically controlled garages. Burglar alarms wailed, triggered by the electricity cuts. Shops opened up without lights, taking cash only, and giving handwritten receipts. As far as the commercial cost is concerned, estimates put it at a loss of Euros 50 million in lack of orders for coffees, croissants and ice-creams. Another Euros 70 million of frozen food is said to have been lost. There is, of course, the many flights that were cancelled from airports throughout the country. One of the shop owners in Rome, coming to terms with the blackout mused: “You realise how vulnerable you are. If we fall out with a country, they can just switch us off and leave us in the dark”. And just recently in the first week of this month, the city of Montpellier in Southern France was hit by floods and storms. Hundreds of residents were forced into emergency shelters by the overnight flashfloods. Roads collapsed as torrents of water upended cars and burst into homes for the second time in seven days. The blackout raised a storm and heads rolled. The European leaders this month struck a broad climate change pact obliging the EU as a whole to cut greenhouse gases by at least 40 per cent by 2030. As the former European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso commented “this package is very good news for our fight against climate change”. That is as far that may go. While this may be good news for the European Union, it is not so for poorer countries. A recent report by a UK based think-tank, Overseas Development Institute, said that “while richer countries invest heavily in flood-defence systems, coastal protection and other projects, poorer countries have no choice but to divert scarce resources, potentially reversing the progress made in tackling poverty”. Floods and landslides have not spared Rwanda either. They have been among the major disasters that have had a debilitating impact on the country’s human development and environment. Did you ever imagine for a second how we can be so vulnerable as a nation? There are so many things we tend to take for granted. Perhaps our casual approach to things is because we live in situations of near emergencies that we do not bother. Blackouts to us do not constitute news at all. This is a familiar occurrence. No one raises a finger whenever we have a blackout. Sometimes a house catches fire in the middle of town and by the time the fire brigade arrives, half the building is razed on the ground. Someone falls in a 20-feet pit latrine – and there are not few in Kigali – and you wonder whom to turn to. A child is electrocuted by a live wire, carelessly left uncovered by the Energy Group people, and those around might not immediately report the case. We will need to fast track our risk assessment and disaster preparedness as a way of mitigating the uncertainties wrought by such disasters. Ultimately however, the vulnerability of the developed world demonstrates that there is something they share with us, whether they like it or not—the uncertainties of development as a common denominator. The writer is a consultant and visiting lecturer at the RDF Senior Command and Staff College, Nyakinama. oscar_kim2000@yahoo.co.uk

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Environmental degradation and how we are all vulnerable