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How Cities Heal After Disasters

February 10th 2010 01:44

Haiti Earthquake 2010

With the earthquake in Haiti still fresh in our minds we may ask the question how do cities come back from natural disasters?
Some cities never recover from the destruction or return to their former selves, while others emerge from the rubble to continue with life as normal. There are a few cities however, that use the obliteration of the old to start new, fresh and improved.

As seen in this NewsWeek article, here are how various cities have dealt with catastrophe.

The Great Fire of London, 1666

The still-largely wooden English capital was devastated by fire for three days in September 1666. As a long, dry summer came to a close, a blaze ripped through the city's narrow streets, leaving 100,000 homeless--about a sixth of the population--and destroying the 600-year-old St. Paul's Cathedral. In a turbulent political climate and with fears of a Dutch invasion running high, the conflagration could have been a death blow. Instead, the city rebuilt, widening its streets and improving conditions; some historians believe this also helped to end a string of disease epidemics that had ravaged London. Perhaps most enduringly, the architect Sir Christopher Wren was commissioned to build some 50 churches, many of which remain landmarks, especially his monumental domed baroque replacement for the incinerated Old St. Paul's.

San Francisco Earthquake, 1906

One of the mighty San Andreas fault's most destructive moments destroyed much of San Francisco and forever shifted the centre of California commerce southward. Early on the morning of April 18, an earthquake estimated at a magnitude of 7.8 shook the city. It was followed by widespread fires, which broke out because gas mains had been ruptured by the quake and which are blamed for most of the damage (the use of dynamite in an attempt to stop the blaze's spread likely didn't help). All told, some 3,000 people were killed, more than half of the city's 400,000 residents were left homeless, and the damage cost more than $400 million in 1906 dollars, or about $9.5 billion today. While the city, which for many years was the cultural and economic capital of the west, rebuilt, industry and commerce moved 350 miles south to Los Angeles, which overtook Frisco as a commercial capital.

Chernobyl, 1986

Though hardly a thriving metropolis, the then Soviet town of Pripyat boasted some 50,000 residents on April 26, 1986. That day, in the worst nuclear power accident ever, a reactor at the nearby nuclear power plant named for the neighboring town of Chernobyl exploded. A series of subsequent explosions emitted 400 times the radiation of the Hiroshima bomb. Although only 56 direct deaths were recorded, thousands of cancer cases are blamed on the episode.
Roughly 336,000 people were evacuated from contaminated areas, and unlike a fire, earthquake or, flood, it's no simple matter of rebuilding. Because many areas remain poisonous, they are chilling ghost towns today, falling into disrepair and with former residents' personal effects left as they were when the hurried evacuation began.

Indian Ocean Tsunami, 2004

an earthquake caused an enormous tsunami that swept across the Indian Ocean, flattening entire towns and villages thousands of miles from the quake's epicentre and killing an estimated 230,000 people, making it the fifth most deadly quake ever. Based on its magnitude of 9.0, it was the second largest ever. Because of the wide swath the wave cut and the remoteness of some hard-hit areas, it's hard to draw general conclusions about the recovery effort. In the case of the Indonesian province of Aceh, however, the World Bank has declared work a success.

The international community pledged nearly $8 billion to reconstruct Aceh. There have been some difficulties, but a long-running and violent battle with separatists seems to have ended, while poverty, which unsurprisingly skyrocketed in the wake of the tsunami, is now below pre-quake levels. The vast international effort, coordinated by transnational organizations, could be the template for a successful recovery in Haiti.

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Posted By: Ian - Category: nature

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