Hell and High Water

The last few years have been the worst period on record for environmental disasters and experts are predicting far worse to come. Tim Redford reports.

Here is how to become a disaster statistic. Move to a shanty town on an unstable hillside near a tropical coast. Crowd together as more and more people arrive. Wait for the world to get a little warmer. More evaporation means more rain, which means the slopes will get progressively more waterlogged. One day, the land will turn to mud, and the neighborhood will begin to go downhill. Literally. And if the slope is steep enough, the landslide will accelerate to more than 200 miles an hour. Peter Walker, of the international federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent societies, has seen it all too often. “First, your house has been washed away. Second, the land that you farmed has disappeared. (1) ________________.

In the last decade, floods, droughts, windstorms, earthquakes, avalanches, volcanic eruptions and forest fires have become increasingly common. There has been disastrous flooding in Asia, Africa, Central and South America and Oceania. (2) ___________. Storms have been getting worse everywhere too, with a growing number of hurricanes hitting the US, the Caribbean and Central America. Drought has affected large areas of Sub-Saharan Africa for years and many other zones are becoming drier. (3) ___________. A number of nations have already been in armed conflict over water, and drought in the West of the US has resulted in enormous forest fires.

Volcanic eruptions and earthquakes have always been a threat in certain parts of the world. A volcanic eruption virtually wiped out the small Caribbean island of Montserrat in 1997 and there have been serious earthquakes in Greece, Turkey and El Salvador. The quake that rocked the small Central American country El Salvador in 2001 came as people were still rebuilding their houses and recovering from the 1998’s Hurricane Mitch.

So why is nature beginning to turn on us? (4) _____________. The population of the world is growing at the rate of 10,000 people an hour, 240,000 every day, nearly 90 million a year, with most of the growth in the developing world. People in agricultural areas, unemployed and sometimes undernourished, move to the cities, and then set up homes on poor soil, crowded into substandard buildings. (5) _______________. This has mainly been caused by the mismanagement of the world’s resources: carbon emissions from rich countries; the activities of the big multinational companies; the deforestation of the world’s forests. As a result, a hotter ocean breeds fiercer cyclones and hurricanes. I t surrenders greater quantities of water as evaporation, and more powerful winds dump this water against mountainsides with increasing fury. Atlantic hurricanes, for instance, are 40% more intense now than they were 30 years ago.

Volcanoes and earthquakes are even more dangerous than in the past as around half the world’s population now lives in cities. There are more than 500 active and semi-active volcanoes, about fifty of which erupt each year, and more than 500 million people now live within range of a volcanic eruption. An even greater number live at risk, in some degree, from earthquakes which have taken a toll of more than 1.6 million lives in the last hundred years.

All the betting from the disaster professionals is that things will get worse. Professor McGuire, of University College London, is a volcanologist who has been warning for years that the world has not seen the worst nature can do. The worst eruption in human history was probably Mt Tambora in 1815, in Indonesia. It pumped so much dust into the stratosphere that it effectively cancelled the following summer in Europe and America. (6) ______________. “It reduced temperatures by maybe 6°C in some places and the whole planet was plunged into winter for years. And there are about two of these events every 100,000 years…”

b. Find the English equivalents for the following words and phrases:

Испарение, склон (горы), раскисший от воды, крутой (склон), десятилетие, ландшафт, вооруженный конфликт, стереть с лица земли, перенаселение, расти со скоростью, безработный, не получающий достаточного питания, не соответствующий стандартам, вырубка леса, извергаться (о вулкане), уносить жизни, снизить температуру, быть погруженным

c. Read the text again and answer these questions.

1. What is the attitude of the journalist towards the future?

2. Who is more likely to be a victim of natural disasters?

3. Why are there now more hurricanes, floods and droughts?

4. Why are volcanoes and earthquakes more dangerous now?

5. What could be the biggest threat to the planet in the future?

6. What effects might this threat have?

d. Look at the words from the text (1-10) and the other examples in the parentheses. Match the prefixes with the meanings (a-j).

6. Discuss the questions.

1. What natural disasters have happened in the last few months?

2. What do you think governments can do to prevent natural disasters?

3. What organizations do you know that provide aid after disasters or work for the environment?

4. What can we do as individuals to improve the environment and help victims of natural disasters?

7. a) Make sure that you know the meaning of the following words.

To overflow, looters, TV bulletins, a perverse desire, to come to one’s senses, an escape route, impassable, to wade into the water.

b) You are going to listen to Martin Cinert from Prague talking about the night the River Vltava flooded. Mark the sentences T (true) or F (false). Correct the false sentences.

1. He wasn’t at risk at his office, but he was at risk at his apartment.

2. He took his wife and child to his parents’ house.

3. He went back to the apartment because he was excited by the situation.

4. Martin went to a place near his apartment to watch the water level rising.

5. He looked out the window and saw that his parking lot was starting to flood.

6. He was the last person to leave his apartment building.

7. All the roads he tried were flooded now.

8. He decided to follow another car through the water.

9. Martin’s car broke down as he drove through the water.

10. All the apartments in his building were seriously damaged.

c) Retell the story.

d) Have you or someone you know experienced a natural disaster? What happened?

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