TED Conversations

Tony Sandy

This conversation is closed. Start a new conversation
or join one »

That regimes / materials, could be put in place to deal with flooding in Bangladesh / Pakistan. instead of the same problems recurring.

My proposal is Government based. It is simply to deal with the flooding of the Indus Delta and the humanitarian crisis it evokes. It requires the building of wooden rafts with anchors and, possibly masts and steering mechanisms, to ensure that when the floods come to the region, the majority of the population that is usually affected, survives by floating above the rising waters or drifts away and is picked up by naval or civilan craft in the area. To facilitate this, buoys could be floated out in the bay, for drifting rafts to anchor to or booms to catch them when they drift away from the main driving force of the rivers current.

The rafts could carry survival rations and water containers or distilling mechanisms, to ensure fresh water supply. They could be either family based and be lived in all the time, in the countryside, ready for such an emergency or communal. Inflatable craft could also be stored in villages and towns, within a building made expressly for the purpose, to supplement wooden built rafts, that might be impractical in crowded housing conditions.

The wooden rafts should have a house or hut on top of them for shelter, whether lived in or net, to provide shelter from the elements. It might even be possible to supply bouyancy devices, to be fitted to livestock, in order to stop them drowning in the floods too but this would depend how practical this would be.

People should be instructed what to do should the situation arise and how to signal for help if their anchor ropes should break, causing them to drift away from the land (Flares could be provided, with instructions to only use them at night when they can be best seen, unless the weather conditions make it imperative that landfall occurs as quickly as possible/ Noise makers like gas generated, hand-held horns, could be used to also attract attention, especially during the day and maybe thunder flashes or mirrors for signalling).

progress indicator
  • Feb 21 2012: Ah such common sense! Unfortunately the ideas are for people without much of it - hence overpopulation issues, which the brainy people in this society have to sort out for them. It's not just flood plains but the slopes of volcanoes that people return to because they are so fertile. Simple logic tells us that one day there will be more people than land our resources to support them. When that happens clever ideas will give way to more stupid and brutal ones - war for resources, leading to the spread of disease when hygiene breaks down and famine because nobody will be planting food, just avoiding trying to get killed.
  • thumb
    Feb 20 2012: .
    Surely the best thing would be to *move people out of the areas prone to flooding*.
    Granted that some disasters are freak incidents, but the majority of the issue remains consistently in the same place...yet people go back there and undergo the same events the following year...and then again..
    I can't call such people idiots (such as people near the forests of california who have their houses burned down every year , only to rebuild in the exact same place) due to their poverty, but the best way to solve an issue is to prevent it,
    and seeing as the worst effected (pretty much every single time) are the same people in the same location...move them and leave the area empty.
  • Feb 20 2012: Naval craft and even civilian ones could be drilled on what to do in an emergency and how to co-ordinate rescue missions: Liaison with international rescue teams could also be laid on, to assist, should they be based in the area or passing through on exercises.

    Local communities should also be drilled on what to do during a crisis, so that there is no panic, just orderly routines, carried out automatically in response to the situation (appropriate acts at appropriate times, co-ordinated and executed at certain signs).

    The Dutch are already developing their own answer to this situation by building floating houses on floodplains at Maasbommel and possibly elsewhere. This is probably too sophisticated a solution for the Indus Delta but the principle is the same - float the population and reduce disruption to a minimum.

    This is the general proposal that I sent to The Bangladeshi and subsequently The Pakistani government, with regards to their more recent floods but without response. I also sent it to various charities, only one showing an interest. I’d also sent it into a competition, run in America, to help Bangladesh as a country but this appears to have been commercial and not humanitarian aid orientated as I’d thought first of all.