“My biggest fear is that we’re sitting with the makings of a human catastrophe,” a doctor in Sindh province, in the south of Pakistan, warned. The remark was disconcerting, almost bizarre, in the context of floods that have ravaged a third of the country, killed more than 1,500 of its citizens and destroyed 1.8m homes over two months. What was that if not a catastrophe? Yet while the waters are finally beginning to recede, and while international attention has moved on, the medic was correct to warn that the devastation is still unfolding.
“There is some debate about whether the disaster is the initial ‘big bang’ or the years that follow,” the recovery expert Prof Lucy Easthope writes in her recent book When the Dust Settles. “Life after disaster is perpetual, chronic, with a pain that ebbs and flows like tides,” with initial events followed by a “new, long, chronic loss”. Extreme events rip lives apart. The terrifying force of nature unleashed makes headlines and fills broadcasts with compelling, appalling images: torrents of water, vast lakes where fields once stood. But it is the aftermath which determines the true physical, economic, social and psychological cost.
