Experts Say Bangladesh to Face Flood Peril for Years

Geography, environmental degradation and good intentions gone awry are combining to confront the 110 million overwhelmingly poor people of Bangladesh with the prospect of eternally suffering the kind of increasingly devastating floods now ravaging their country.

Water experts, engineers and longtime observers of this vast river basin are at a loss to pinpoint the exact cause of this year’s flooding, acknowledged to be the worst in modern times.

(Dhaka newspapers on Friday reported 101 more deaths in 24 hours and put the total at 1,402. The government count remained at 609, while the International Red Cross said that, by its count, the flooding had claimed 637 lives.)

But there is no doubt that the flood situation has been building for some time and is a likely portent of things to come.

A Most Desperate Test

For the tens of millions still living on waterlogged spits of land or clinging to rooftops as the floodwaters swirl below them, the need now is for food, medicine and some prospect that they will see dry land soon.

(In Washington, the Reagan Administration announced Friday a series of moves that will raise U.S. assistance to flood victims in Bangladesh to $150 million. Most of the increase involves redirecting aid funds, officials said.

(At the same time, a U.S. official with the Agency for International Development said that a relief flight left for Bangladesh on Friday night carrying 2.2 million square feet of plastic for shelters, 10,000 five-gallon water cans, 26 water tanks with a capacity of 3,000 gallons and two water purification units capable of producing nearly 5,000 gallons an hour.)

Yet even if Bangladesh gets past its current crisis, there is no guarantee of the future.

“There has been long-range environmental degradation in the north, massive loss of forests,” said one expert this week as he negotiated the flooded streets of Dhaka.

Satellite maps of this region for the past several years have shown the massive accumulation of silt rushing down from the great mountains of Nepal and northern India through the vast river system that makes up this Wisconsin-sized nation. As the forest cover of the Himalayas has been cut in half since 1950, the impact is felt here.

The unbridled cutting of the great Himalayan forests for firewood, land and sheer profit is finally reaping a different reward downstream.

Himalayas Losing Topsoil

“The loss of topsoil in the Himalayas is ultimately leading to the flat plains and the deltaic region’s waterways getting clogged,” said B. M. Abbas, a former minister of water resources in Bangladesh.

“The forest used to keep back part of the rainfall, soaking it up in the soft forest floor,” he added. “Then it was released slowly in the dry season. Now it flows rapidly and with it the gravel, small stones and sand.”

Since 54 rivers flow into the country from India, and the Ganges and the Brahmaputra form the world’s largest deltaic region, any total river control system becomes impossible to consider. With about 1.2 billion tons of silt flowing into these river systems yearly, the problem is vastly compounded.

The experts agree that in the long term, the only thing that can prevent Bangladesh from being increasingly submerged in annual flooding is a coordinated plan to control the water where it starts, in the Himalayan reaches of Nepal and the mountains of Assam State in northeastern India.

“The only short-term solution is embankments, but they can’t be just anywhere,” said Dr. Aimun Nishat, a water control expert at Dhaka University.

Right now, nearly 20% of the country has some kind of protection through embankments, hydraulic systems or river closures. The problem is that this is not enough, the experts said.