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VANUATU CONFRONTED WITH NIGHTMARE SCENARIO AS COVID-19 PREPARATIONS DERAILED BY SEVERE CYCLONE
“In Vanuatu, we have to build our community’s resilience and our capability to recover very quickly as we’ve learned from the past two years that we can be responding to more than one disaster at the same time,” said Abraham Nasak, Director of Vanuatu’s National Disaster Management Agency when he was at the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction in Geneva last year.
But even he probably never envisaged the nightmare scenario of having to prepare for a category 5 cyclone at the same time as trying to stop the arrival in his country of the COVID19 pandemic.
Extreme weather events and other natural hazards don’t stop happening because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Category 5 Cyclone Harold hitting Vanuatu and threatening other islands in the south Pacific including Tonga and Fiji, is the first major instance of this happening and the repercussions will be considerable from several aspects.
First though it is important to say that Vanuatu and other Pacific Islands which will face the wrath of Cyclone Harold have very well-developed disaster management systems which will keep mortality from such events low.
Unfortunately, the economic losses and damage to critical infrastructure are likely to be considerable with knock-on effects for their overall ability to fight the COVID-19 pandemic including damage to health facilities, loss of housing, damage to water and sanitation and other important infrastructure, the scale of which has not yet been determined.
No cases have been reported so far of COVID-19 on Vanuatu but the rules on social distancing have had to be suspended as thousands of people moved to safe shelters and evacuation centers to escape the storm.
Reports coming in from various sources speak of significant damage in multiple small communities throughout several islands. In one Pentecost Island village of 231 people, all its 55 homes were damaged or destroyed but no casualties hve been reported.
Vanuatu ranks as one of the most disaster affected countries in the world. This is the second time in five years that it has been hit by a Category 5 cyclone.
In March 2015, Cyclone Pam struck the island causing 14 deaths and damage and losses estimated at $450 million, approximately 64% of the country’s GDP.
The storm also pushed back Vanuatu's expected graduation from LDC status by three years. In December 2017, the UN Committee on Development Policy recommended that Vanuatu's smooth transition process should seek to reduce the country’s vulnerability to disasters ahead of Vanuatu's planned LDC graduation on 4 December 2020. Depending on the economic losses inflicted by this latest disaster, that date could come under further review.
