Prevention

Vulnerable Communities

Schools

Prevention

A VOICE FROM CARIACO

 

GeoHazards International (GHI) was founded in 1991 as a nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing death and suffering caused by earthquakes in the world's most vulnerable communities. Since that time, GHI has developed and applied methods that will save lives worldwide. GHI's focus is on prevention, as it works to limit predictable losses due to natural disasters in the world's most vulnerable communities.

 

The photograph on this page, and the story behind it, make terribly clear how critical prevention is to the welfare of communities at risk. The photograph depicts the ruins of one of the seven schools in Cariaco, Venezuela, that collapsed in an earthquake in July 1997, killing a total of 45 children. As GHI staff took this photograph, weeks after the earthquake, a local man approached to explain how he had run to the school to help the victims, as soon the earthquake had struck. He had located his nephew, a student at the school, calling to him from under the rubble. Despite the man's pleas, local police did not allow him to dig for his nephew and other trapped children, because search-and-rescue professionals were supposed to be on the way. They were on the way, but they arrived the next day—too late to save the boy or his classmates.

 

This story is particularly poignant for GHI because two years before this earthquake, GHI had prepared a plan with Venezuelans on how to reduce the earthquake risk of four Venezuelan cities, including Cariaco. This plan was presented to various local government agencies, but the modest funds required to implement it were never approved. The decision makers did not adequately grasp the life-saving difference that prevention could make.

 

There is no guarantee that, had GHI's plan been implemented, it would have saved those children. But it might have! Parents could have been made aware of their risk, emergency workers could have been trained, and the most vulnerable schools could have been strengthened—steps that are routine in industrialized countries and that are being taken today in Nepal, Ecuador, Mexico, Pakistan, India, Chile, Indonesia, China, and Central Asia, as a result of successful GHI initiatives.

 

Your support makes it possible for GHI not only to continue but to expand its prevention efforts, informing more communities of their risk and of affordable options to reduce it. With your help, GHI will keep working to solve the urgent global problem of the growing natural disaster risk in developing countries.

 

Brian Tucker