Why the Cyclone in Myanmar Was So Deadly

It was Asia's answer to Hurricane Katrina—though with a reported 100,000 killed, it was many times more deadly. Packing winds upward of 120 miles an hour (193 kilometers an hour), Cyclone Nargis became one of Asia's deadliest storms by hitting land at one of the lowest points in Myanmar (also called Burma) and setting off a storm surge that reached 25 miles (40 kilometers) inland.

"When we saw the [storm] track, I said, 'Uh oh, this is not going to be good,'" said Mark Lander, a meteorology professor at the University of Guam.

"It would create a big storm surge. It was like Katrina going into New Orleans."

(See photos of the cyclone damage and watch survivors tell their stories.)

"Cyclone" is the name given to a hurricane when it occurs in the northern Indian Ocean or, as is the case with Cyclone Nargis, the Bay of Bengal (see map). (Get the basics on hurricanes/cyclones.)

Deadly Path

Forecasters began tracking the cyclone April 28 as it first headed toward India. As projected, the storm took a sharp turn eastward. But it didn't follow the typical cyclone track, which leads to Bangladesh or Myanmar's mountainous northwest.

Instead, the cyclone swept into the low-lying Irrawaddy River Delta in central Myanmar. The result was the worst disaster ever in the impoverished country.

It was the first time such an intense storm is known to have hit the delta, said Jeff Masters, co-founder and director of meteorology at the San Francisco-based Web site Weather Underground.

He called it "one of those once-in-every-500-years kind of things."

"The easterly component of the path is unusual," Masters said. "It tracked right over the most vulnerable part of the country, where most of the people live."

When the storm made landfall early Saturday at the mouth of the Irrawaddy River, the cyclone's battering winds pushed a wall of water as tall as 12 feet (3.7 meters) some 25 miles (40 kilometers) inland, laying waste to villages and killing tens of thousands. Most of the dead were in the delta, where farm families sleeping in shacks barely above sea level were swept to their deaths.

Almost 95 percent of the houses and other buildings in seven townships were destroyed, Myanmar's government says. UN officials estimate 1.5 million people were left in severe straits.

"When you look at the satellite picture of before and after the storm, the effects look eerily similar to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in how it inundated low-lying areas," said Ken Reeves, director of forecasting for AccuWeather.com.

(See satellite images of the New Orleans area before and after Hurricane Katrina.)

The Irrawaddy Delta "is huge, and the interaction of water and land lying right at sea level allowed the tidal surge to deliver maximum penetration of sea water over land," Reeves said.

"Storms like this do most of their killing through floods, with salt water being even more dangerous than fresh water."

The delta had lost most of its mangrove forests along the coast to shrimp farms and rice paddies over the past decade. That removed what scientists say is one of nature's best defenses against violent storms.

"If you look at the path of the [cyclone] that hit Myanmar, it hit exactly where it was going to do the most damage, and it's doing the most damage because much of the protective vegetation was cleared," said Jeff NcNeely, chief scientist for the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

"It's an expensive lesson, but it has been one taught repeatedly," he said. "You just wonder why governments don't get on this."

Global Warming?

Some environmentalists suggested global warming may have played a role.

Last year the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that warming oceans could contribute to increasingly severe cyclones with stronger winds and heavier rains.

"While we can never pinpoint one disaster as the result of climate change, there is enough scientific evidence that climate change will lead to intensification of tropical cyclones," said Sunita Narain, director of the India-based environmental group Centre for Science and Environment.

"Nargis is a sign of things to come," she said.

"The victims of these cyclones are climate change victims, and their plight should remind the rich world that it is doing too little to contain its greenhouse gas emissions."

Weather experts, however, are divided over whether global warming is a factor in catastrophic storms.

At a January conference of the American Meteorological Society, some experts postulated that warmer ocean temperatures may actually reduce the strength of cyclones and hurricanes.

Masters, at Weather Underground, said Wednesday that, in the case of Nargis, the meteorological data in the Indian Ocean region "is too short and too poor in quality to make judgments about whether tropical cyclones have been affected by global warming."

Unnecessary Deaths?

Despite assertions by Myanmar's military government that it had warned people about the storm, critics contend the junta didn't do enough to alert the delta and failed to organize any evacuations, perhaps resulting in unnecessary deaths.

"Villagers were totally unaware," said 38-year-old Khin Khin Myawe, interviewed in the hard-hit delta town of Labutta.

"We knew the cyclone was coming but only because the wind was very strong. No local authorities ever came to us with information about how serious the storm was."

The India Meteorological Department, one of six regional warning centers set up by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), began sending regular storm advisories April 27. The information appeared in Myanmar's state-run newspapers, on radio, and on television 48 hours ahead of the storm.

But the international advisories said nothing about a storm surge. And Myanmar, unlike its neighbors Bangladesh and India, has no radar network to help predict the location and height of surges, the WMO said.

There also wasn't any coordinated effort on the part of the junta to move people out of low-lying areas, even though information was available about the expected time and location of landfall.

"How is it possible that there was such a great death toll in the 21st century, when we have imagery from satellites in real time and there are specialized meteorology centers in all the regions?" said Olavo Rasquinho of the UN Typhoon Committee Secretariat.

Bangladesh has a storm-protection system that includes warning sirens, evacuation routes, and sturdy towers to shelter people—measures that were credited with limiting the death toll from last year's Cyclone Sidr to 3,100.

Atiq A. Rahman, executive director of the Bangladesh Center for Advanced Studies and a disaster specialist, said Myanmar's death toll would have been lower if it had had such a system.

"Taking some action to move people from affected areas would have dramatically helped reduce the numbers of causalities. Absolutely," Rahman said.

But junta officials and some weather experts said evacuating a large area with millions of residents would have been nearly impossible, given the poor roads, the distance to some villages, and the likely refusal of some families to leave.

"Even if they warned them, they can't go anywhere. Or they are afraid to go anywhere, because they are afraid of losing their property," said Lander, the University of Guam professor.

"It is debatable how much of a mass exodus you could have had."

Lily Hindy contributed to this report.

Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Want to Help the Environment? Eat Insects.

David Gracer lifts a giant water bug, places his thumbs in a pre-sliced slit in its underside, and flips off its head. “Smell the meat,” he says, sniffing the decapitated creature, and the people gathered around the table willingly oblige. Members of the New York Gastronauts, a club for adventurous eaters, they murmur appreciatively as they scoop out and swallow the grayish, slightly greasy insect flesh.

“Perfumey, tastes like salty apples,” one says. “Like a scented candle blended with an artichoke,” another adds.

The giant water bug, or Lethocerus indicus, a three-inch-long South Asian insect that looks uncannily like a local cockroach, is just one of the items on the menu of this bug-eating bacchanal. The Gastronauts’ meal may seem more like a reality TV stunt than a radical environmental strategy, but Gracer is on a serious mission to shake up how we all think about our food supply. Gracer, a self-described “geeky poet/nature boy” who teaches composition at a community college in Providence, Rhode Island, has made it his duty to persuade ordinary Americans to eat insects.

Gracer wants people to move away from getting their protein from traditional livestock such as cows, pigs, and chickens because raising livestock has a huge negative impact on the environment, regardless of whether the animals belong to subsistence farmers in developing countries or a Western industrial conglomerate (see “Warning: Contains Pork By-Products,” page 40). A United Nations report released in 2006 calls the livestock sector “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” The report notes that, among other adverse impacts, livestock production is responsible for 18 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. (That’s more than what is produced by transportation worldwide.) And the problem is only going to grow, with global production of meat reaching 465 million tons by 2050, double the amount produced in 2000.

“Americans have no idea how wasteful these large mammals are,” Gracer says. “If you want to feed a lot of people, insects are the best choice in terms of getting the biggest bang for your buck.” Insects, he claims, are nutritious. Although they typically contain less protein by weight than beef or chicken—100 grams of giant water bugs or small grasshoppers, for example, have about 20 grams of protein, compared with 27 grams in the same amount of lean ground beef—they do have other benefits. For instance, grasshoppers contain just one-third of the fat found in beef, and water bugs offer almost four times as much iron. A 100-gram portion of the cooked caterpillar Usata terpsichore has about 28 grams of protein. In their dried form, as they are commonly sold in Africa, insects such as grasshoppers may contain up to 60 percent protein.

Raising insects has a low impact on the environment. They require little water, perhaps because they obtain much of their moisture from their food. It takes 869 gallons of water to produce a third of a pound of beef, about enough for a large hamburger. By contrast, to supply water to a quarter pound of crickets, Gracer simply places­ a moist paper towel at the bottom of their tank and refreshes it weekly. Insects, he says, also need less food and space than vertebrate sources of protein and therefore could replace or supplement food resources that may become scarce in the future, such as fish stocks, which a recent study indicates may collapse by 2048.

Founded in 2005, Gracer’s company, a one-man operation called Sunrise Land Shrimp, educates people about insect eating, or entomophagy. On a roughly monthly basis, Gracer will visit a high school or give a public lecture, and he recently appeared on The Colbert Report (video). Not long ago he traveled to Thailand to attend a United Nations workshop on entomophagy. “I would love to counteract the portrayal of entomophagy that we see on Fear Factor and Survivor,” he says. “It’s my interest to bring it out of the zone of freakdom.” But even Sunrise Land Shrimp doesn’t sell insects—yet. In the United States insects are generally available only as novelty foods, such as the salt-and-vinegar-flavored crickets sold by Hotlix, a California company that specializes in insect-based candies.

Outside the United States, though, in Botswana and Zimbabwe, insect gathering is becoming commercialized. And rural villagers in southern Africa harvest caterpillars from the local mopane trees. Traditionally, mopane caterpillars have been an important source of protein for the villagers, but more recently they have also been packaged and sold as a regional delicacy.

In fact, at least 1,400 species of insects are eaten around the world, and the practice dates back thousands of years. However, even commercially distributed species such as the mopane caterpillar are harvested from wild insect populations, meaning that they are subject to year-to-year fluctuations and problems of overharvesting. What is needed to stabilize the insect food supply is the development of farms. “I’ve been working for a long time on trying to convince people that farming insects for the production of animal protein and other materials might be a good idea,” says Robert Kok, chairman of the department of bioresource engineering at McGill University, near Montreal. “Even if they didn’t want to eat them ‘whole hog,’ so to say, it would be possible to extract the protein and oil from them and then manufacture food products from those components,” Kok adds.

William White of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service in Houma, Louisiana, is skeptical that this will ever come to pass in the United States, where food tends to be overabundant rather than scarce, at least among those above the poverty line. “I don’t believe that we’ve reached the level of scarcity in our food supply, at least in Western societies, where people would be willing to incorporate insects at any level in their diet,” White says. “Certainly in the United States, the [response to] insects almost borders on a phobia.” As Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition at New York University and the author of What to Eat, puts it, “I think people would have to be desperate for food to make insects a principal part of their diet.” There are other obstacles too: Some insects, such as sea shrimp, cause food allergies; others sequester toxins from plants or may harbor pesticide residues.

Even if we don’t all switch to Bug Burgers, Gracer and his insects are helping to change our habit of making knee-jerk decisions about what we should and shouldn’t be eating. According to the latest figures from the United Nations, 854 million people around the world went hungry in 2003. Really thinking about our food choices could be the first step toward feeding our planet’s ever-growing population in a sustainable manner.

Gracer continues to spend much of his spare time speaking at museums and schools about the benefits and joys of bug eating. In the long term, though, he has grander plans: He would like to import edible insects such as the popular mopane caterpillars or set up a commercial operation selling insects already available here, such as spicy Mexican grasshoppers, or chapulines. He knows his mission is not an easy one; for one thing, there is the small matter of funding. “If I did this for a living, my family and I would be eating bugs all the time,” he says.

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Harnessing sunlight on the cheap

For a project that could be on the very cutting edge of renewable energy, this one is actually decidedly low tech--and that's the point.

A team of students, led by mechanical engineering graduate student Spencer Ahrens, has spent the last few months assembling a prototype for a concentrating solar power system they think could revolutionize the field. It's a 12-foot-square mirrored dish capable of concentrating sunlight by a factor of 1,000, built from simple, inexpensive industrial materials selected for price, durability and ease of assembly rather than for optimum performance.

Rather than aiming for a smooth parabolic surface that would bring the sunlight to a perfect focus, the dish is being made with 10-inch-wide by 12-foot-long strips of relatively low-cost, lightweight bathroom-type mirror glass. The frame is assembled from cheap aluminum tubing, with holes drilled in precise locations using a simple jig for alignment, so that the struts can be assembled into a framework that passively snaps into just the right parabolic curvature.

The control mechanism, which allows the dish to track the sun automatically across the sky, is also remarkably simple--photocells mounted on each side of the dish with opaque baffles, which cast a shadow on the cell when it drifts out of alignment, connect to a simple circuit that turns on small electric motors to push the dish back into the right position.

"The technical challenge here is to make it simple," Ahrens explains. The team is keeping careful track of all the costs for parts and the time spent on assembly, to provide a baseline for figuring out what an eventual large-scale field of such dishes would cost. "We're using all commodity materials that are all in high production," he says.

That's in stark contrast to most attempts to build solar dish concentrating systems, which have tended to use expensive custom-made equipment to achieve high efficiency. A few large companies that have built such prototypes tend to "turn it into an ultimate high-tech, high-end project," says Jefferson Tester, HP Meissner Professor of Chemical Engineering, who has been advising the student-led group. "Then Spencer came along and said, 'We're going to fundamentally change this and make this an affordable technology for popular, widespread deployment.'"

Ahrens thinks that in mass production the dishes can be competitive in cost with other energy sources and could produce heat for space heating and electric power at the same time.

The prototype isn't quite finished yet, because of delays in getting the mirror glass shipped from the factory. And the details of assembly and operation could well present some unexpected stumbling blocks, as is so often the case with new designs, Tester says. Still, "they're smart kids, they know what they're doing," he says. "That's how you learn."

This is not the kind of thing you'd build for a single-home, backyard power system, however. Because the highly concentrated sunlight will be so powerful, the team is employing several precautions to safeguard against potential safety risks, and the prototype will not operate in public without supervision.

Instead, the systems are designed to be deployed in large, utility-scale fields, fenced in to protect anyone from being in the wrong place. But because the beam comes to a focus about 12 feet from the surface, the danger is strictly localized--no risks for adjacent buildings or for planes flying overhead, Ahrens explains. When not attended, the dish will be covered "parked" pointing straight up, and will be mounted 7 feet above ground.

The students working on the project, because of their close proximity, will have to take precautions, wearing all-white clothing, to reflect the light, and welder-type goggles to protect their eyes.

Ahrens believes that such a design could quickly produce both hot water for space heating and electricity for the grid at prices that would be competitive today, unlike conventional photovoltaic systems that are still far too pricey for baseload generation. "In the sunbelt, our dish would make about 10,000 peak watts of heat and 3,500 peak watts of electricity," he says. Deployed in large numbers, the systems could make a big difference: "One square meter of concentrator is worth about one barrel of oil per year," he says.

"It's designed for long life--we hope they will last more than 30 years with good maintenance--and for indigenous manufacturing in the developing world with minimal tooling," Ahrens says. "We want to get something up that will be kind of viral and be widely adopted around the world."

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