Tsunami still taking toll on environment

By Michael Casey

updated 9:39 a.m. ET Dec. 19, 2005

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia - There’s enough tsunami trash in this Indonesian city to make a three-story-high pile covering 30 football fields. In Sri Lanka, the volume of waste dumped in lagoons and waterways is more than twice what was generated by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, by U.N. estimate.

The environmental devastation in the worst-hit countries is immense, yet experts say it pales in comparison with what humans had already managed to inflict before the giant waves struck on Dec. 26, 2004.

In the Maldives, many of the 1,100 islands are uninhabitable because they are covered in trash, and wells that provided drinking water for more than a quarter of the population are contaminated.

A year after the tsunami tore across the Indian Ocean, the signs of devastation are still everywhere.

The earthquake that caused the tsunami reshaped the landscape of some Indonesian and Indian islands, lifting reefs out of the water, eroding beaches and submerging coconut groves. The giant waves caused ecological damage across Indian Ocean coastlines.

But the destruction was mostly localized and overall it pales in comparison to years of rampant development and dynamite fishing, experts say.

Authorities are grappling with how to dispose of the vast volume of tsunami waste, some of it laced with oil, asbestos and hazardous waste.

And experts fear rebuilding could contribute to illegal logging, overfishing and unchecked coastal construction.

Damage isn’t over
Pasi Rinne of the U.N. Environment Program said all the tsunami countries face the problem of debris and demolition waste. “In the long term, unsafe disposal of waste will cause further environmental damage,” Rinne said.

The Dec. 26 tsunami devastated mostly rural, coastal communities in 12 countries, leaving at least 216,000 people dead or missing and leaving more than a million homeless.

The giant, fast-moving waves swept cars, fishing boats and houses up to four miles inland. Entire fishing villages were reduced to piles of bricks, corrugated tin and wood that together with ocean mud and thousands of dead bodies formed mountains of debris.

Binsar Bakkara / AP Fish are taken from boats to local markets in Lam Pulo, Indonesia, last November. Conservationists fear that a surge in donated boats may contribute to overfishing.

In Banda Aceh, the provincial capital of the Indonesian province on the island of Sumatra, the waters that raged through downtown gathered up to 350 million cubic feet of waste, all but 15 percent of which washed out to sea.

In Sri Lanka, some 95 million cubic feet of waste was dumped mostly in lagoons and environmentally sensitive waterways, the United Nations said.

By comparison, the Sept. 11 attacks generated 42 million cubic feet of waste, according to the U.N.

“It was everywhere. The waste was in the streets. We had dead bodies under houses and in ponds. We thought we were facing severe public health problems,” said Tim Walsh, head of the U.N. Development Program’s tsunami waste management operation in Aceh.

There were no epidemics, however, and Banda Aceh reopened its main landfill within weeks. The UNDP started a $15 million recycling program using hundreds of survivors to pluck wood and stone from the rubble to use in rebuilding, as fuel and in furniture.

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