High tides starting on 7 October broke through part of a 10,000km series of embankments in the southern coastal plain in Khulna District, 350km from Dhaka. The area was among the hardest hit by Cyclone Aila in May 2009.
“Even in Koira College playground [in Khulna District], there is still three to four [feet, or one metre of] high water,” said Shariful Islam Selim, coordinator of local NGO Humanity Watch, which has been working with communities still recovering from last year’s cyclone.
According to the government’s flood management agency, the Bangladesh Water Development Board (BWDB), 88km of the embankment was destroyed while 672km was badly damaged in the 7-8 October floods. This is in addition to widespread damage that is still unrepaired from storms in previous years.
The government estimates it will cost USD$16,000 to repair an 88-km stretch.
The southern coastal plain’s network of embankment encircles 125 pieces of land called “polders”, which shield communities, crops and livestock from perennial storms, but can also cut them off from income sources.
Lives versus livelihoods
“[The] purpose of any flood control project should be pro-poor people. But polders and embankments sometimes are causing problems for the poor by affecting open fisheries and causing water logging in other parts [of the embankment area],” said Jahir Uddin Chowdhury, a Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology professor with the Institute of Water and Flood Management.
In addition to holding back the river tides, the embankment prevents fish from coming into canals or wetlands, cutting off an income source for fishermen and needed irrigation for crops. A more practical solution would be to build homes, roads and key infrastructure on higher ground, he proposed.
It would be like before the 1960s when embankments were first constructed: "Before the construction of the embankment, people lived in this country without any embankment. So people could live without any embankment by building homes, roads and key infrastructure on higher ground," Chowdhury said.
But just because something is broken does not mean it is not needed, said the BWDB chief monitor. “Because of lack of repair work on embankments, there might be [a] problem [with the embankment] in some parts of the country. But that does not mean Bangladesh does not need embankments,” said Saidur Rahman. “It is not possible to protect [a] huge population from floods without embankments,” he said.
If doing away with embankments is not feasible, they need to be repaired, said Chowdhury. “As almost two-thirds of the country is under the coverage of embankments, we cannot break them now. Now the government’s task is to ensure a proper maintenance of these embankments.”
Awaiting repairs
After every storm, a large area of embankment is washed away. Repairs have been insufficient or non-existent.
“There is no improvement of the embankment that was affected in [Cyclone] Aila. Some parts were repaired but the repair work did not last long. Many people are still living on roads. Many were migrated to different places,” Humanity Watch’s Shariful told IRIN.
The government plans to fix the Aila-affected parts of the embankment by June 2011, said Habibur Rahman, director general of BWDB.
More embankments are needed to minimize flood damage, which would mean even more maintenance, said Chowdhury. “Because of the long flood plain area, we need a long embankment and its maintenance is not an easy task,’ he added.
A compromise to save both lives and livelihoods would be to open the embankment in key areas with gates, allowing some water to feed the canals, suggested Chowdhury.
Eighty percent of Bangladesh is on a low-lying flood plain, crisscrossed by hundreds of rivers and channels.
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