ENVIRONMENTAL PERSPECTIVE

The Ministry of Education, seen here one day after Hurricane Mitch-induced rains and flooding relented, were knee-deep in flood waters again earlier this year only days after the rainy season began. (Photo by Eric Schwimmer)

By JON KOHL

Special to Honduras This Week

Honduras didn't do its homework on hurricane preparedness and received a walloping demerit.  The teacher's scolding was predictable: those who don't study history tend to repeat it.

Honduras matriculated into that class 25 years ago when Hurricane Fifi struck the North Coast, killing 10,000.  The class, called "How to Prepare for Hurricanes and Other Natural Disasters in Honduras," is still a relevant course today.  But how much has Honduras learned?

"Look at Fifi and see what happened thereafter; there was some river channeling and international donors pumped in a bunch of money, but the issues are social and economic.  The learning process is very slow.  I have not seen any land use change after Fifi and I don't see any now," says Fred Tracy, chief of party for a project to improve upper watershed management after the hurricane.

Almost a quarter of a century after Fifi, Honduras was battered by a super-hurricane named Mitch that left thousands dead, billions in damages and hundreds of thousands of flood victims.  In the class on Hurricane preparedness, Honduras has not done its homework and receives a failing grade.

Radio Reloj announcer Leny Moncada can't help but express his disappointment with the government.  The Ministry of Education lost a building during the hurricane as the bloated Choluteca River, which snakes through downtown Tegucigalpa, Honduras' capital, ate it up.  So they built another one in the flood zone close to the river.  With the first May rains, ministry officials found themselves knee-deep in water.  Benny shrugs his audible shoulders as only radio announcers can, "Why did they rebuild in a high-risk zone?"

REPLAY OF BAD HABITS

In fact a year and a half after Mitch, we see many environmentally bad habits on replay.  People are moving back into high-risk zones, farming practices degrade upper watersheds, illegal logging damages forests, trash dumping and sediment stop up storm drains (50 percent are out of order, which caused the flood in the ministry building), new buildings weaken river channels; lack of educational campaigns, poor emergency readiness, forest burning.

"It certainly brings to head the need to have a theory of conservation and a watershed management program nationwide.  That would help reduce damages," notes an official of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Honduras.  "A lot of human loss of life [after Mitch] could have been avoided with disaster preparedness."

On the North Coast, the Aguan River flooded big after Fifi.  It is a closed basin and dumps huge amounts of water straight into the ocean.  Not only did the same flooding occur with Mitch, but it carried the village of Santa Rosa de Aguan out to sea, drowning dozens.  There was no effort in the headwaters to do something to avoid this repeat catastrophe.

The continuance of these practices only leaves Honduras more vulnerable to another application of pedagogic discipline.  The Choluteca, perhaps the worst mercenary of destruction employed by Mitch, sits seven feet higher now than before Mitch due to siltation, notes Tracy, also a hydrologist.  That's seven feet of lost water retention capacity.

There are more than 1.5 million Hondurans in risk zones, 700,000 around the capital (57 percent of the population) (http://www.laprensahn.com/natarc/0005/n22001.htm).  The spokesman for the national fire department, Oscar Triminio, was quoted in La Prensa on May 22 as saying, "The people should have already been trained for evacuations, know where to go in case of a flood or landslide and what measures to take with the family, with children, but nothing has been done."  In light of predictions of heavy rains and hurricane formation this season (rains begin in May and hurricanes in August), the national emergency committee as well as the Central American ministers of defense are scurrying to prepare what they can.

CORRUPTION

Why doesn't the government simply do its homework like a good student?

Transparency International has been touting one reason.  It has ranked Honduras for two consecutive years now among the top three most corrupt governments in the world, though corruption is not new.  After Fifi, the military government sponged up a lot of the aid that rained down on the country.  Whether or not the government has learned lessons from that epoch, certainly international donors have.  They have pressured the current administration into some levels of transparency to make sure that donations arrive at their intended destinations.

But is there enough transparency to go around?  The ills of Honduras can be recounted through the 70 percent of its bridges destroyed by Mitch.  Perhaps the most embarrassing and ironic example of bridge failure was the Juan Ramon Molina Bridge.  This bridge over the Choluteca came down smack dab in the center of Tegucigalpa.  But it was not Mitch's fault:  Molina fell only last February.  It was a temporary Bailey bridge that collapsed, according to most accounts, because the public works ministry never posted a sign indicating maximum weight and the repeated passage of big trucks caused the bridge one day to bow down into the chocolate river.

The news media frenzied over the silliness of this loss.  But one can only ask if there was not enough supervision to avoid such an obvious flaw in an obvious location, what chance is there that international supervisors will detect corrupt constructors skimming off cement and dumping more sand instead in the concrete mixtures used to build bridge buttresses and caissons?  Writer Lorenzo Dee Belveal (http://ldbelveal.net/toc.htm) argues that 70 percent of the bridges could not have fallen down, even during Mitch, unless they were made below proper engineering specs.  He argues that corruption and political kickbacks drove skimping on materials that weakened their resolve against flood waters.

Few Hondurans would dissent that road and bridge construction prove one of the biggest booties of corruption, and many people doubt that the new generation of bridges will be any sturdier than their fallen kin.

OTHER OBSTACLES

Honduras, though, cannot simply blame corruption.  Even now, the government grapples with obstacles that just should not be.  The president had to issue an order to his minister of public works (the same one who forgot the maximum load sign) to open new roads and bridges and not wait for ribbon-cutting inaugurations.

COHDEFOR, the Honduran forestry agency, has been one of the most corrupt and ineffective in government.  Responsible for managing forests and watersheds, COHDEFOR was so crippled by corruption that after the hurricane many international donors such as USAID stopped funding it.  The special prosecutor for the environment had been investigating several top brass until they finally withdrew from office.

Similarly necessary for environmental protection, the Honduran judiciary passes judgment from its court in shambles.  The president of the Republic has just convoked a commission of social elites to evaluate the judicial system's "irregularities."  That is a sign of hope.

There is more hope, too.  While the government may be too apathetic to get a good grade, other more willing students in class just might.  Although absent for the Fifi case study, municipal governments and non-profits certainly benefitted from Hurricane Mitch.  "The government had no capacity to get to places and clear roads so that traffic could flow again.  For three months, this country was run by local municipalities," says 25-year resident of Honduras, Chester Thomas, founder and director of a major NGO involved in reconstruction and relief in central Honduras, and himself a veteran of Fifi cleanup.

The trend towards decentralization of power in Central America was already underway before Mitch, which only sped up that process.  In fact, the government realized years ago it had too little gumption to manage protected areas, so crucial for water management, and has been doling out administration of protected areas to almost any NGO that can flash its legal constitution.  Similarly, a law was passed a couple years ago allowing municipalities to manage their own watersheds.

GREATER ROLE

Jim Barborak, a leading conservationist in Central America who works for the Wildlife Conservation Society, says that the future of conservation will be fought at the municipality level and urges working there more.  Indeed, USAID is channeling some reconstruction monies through municipalities rather than the central government.

The class offers a comparative watershed management study of the two major cities.  In Tegucigalpa, the hills are bare and the water is managed by a national public utility.  In San Pedro Sula, the second largest city, it fairs better as the hills enjoy some real protection by the municipality.  Local authorities from all over, moreover, now commonly call the U.S. Geological Survey at the American Embassy and ask how dangerous certain zones are, as they must now draw up contingency plans and evacuation procedures.

Similarly, NGOs played active roles in relief and reconstruction, with great amounts of money, food, and materials being passed through their hands.  Bypassing the central government, NGOs avoided bureaucratic casualties and worked directly with communities.  The director of the NGO that manages Pico Bonito National Park reports that as a result of many relief activities including the rebuilding of houses and schools, his organization enjoys better relations with the neighbors.

Perhaps it is unfair to blame the teacher for punishing Honduras, albeit a strict sentence though it was.  Nonetheless, the teacher will test Honduras again ¾ as hurricanes become more frequent ¾ but hopefully the next time Honduras will have done its homework on time.