The 6/13 Disaster: Opening Eyes and Minds
OPED
Georgia remembers myriad days of hardship and tears suffered in bygone years. Some of them are replicated on calendars and diaries. Some have plunged into oblivion, but all of them carry the historical charge of bitterness and poignancy, and will never be expunged from our national memory because they are embossed with pain, and stained with blood.
The 13th of June 2015 in the capital city of Georgia has entered history as one such date- on which a muddy torrential flood and a monstrous landslide of hardly imaginable size and power attacked the sleeping city from its Western hilly vicinity. That night, and many days and nights after, the landscape was ugly and dire in town. The place was mortified and was desperately calling for help: people dead, their houses buried in the thick of the momentarily formed mountains of dirt, debris by the tons, waters furiously pouring, mud oozing like lava from every corner in all directions, the zoo animals at large and many of them gone forever, all of us scared to death and feeling powerless, businesses ruined, roads destroyed, communication crippled, tens of millions in damage, tunnels burst open, bridges collapsed, the government at a loss, the city dwellers in panic, unable to fathom what had happened, morale at the nadir and desperation at the zenith – that was it in a nutshell and on the surface.
In broad reality and in the longer run, the situation was much worse. It was simply disastrous. Life seemed to have stopped right there, where the elements had brutally altered the way of life in the country.
And then, several hours into our flooded and thus paralyzed life, we all started to come to ourselves, measuring ourselves up to the consequence. We are still under the impression of last year’s uproar of the earth, reflecting back on the catastrophe, counting and recounting the loss, creating documentaries and photo-albums to preserve the deluge as a reminder of God’s will, rethinking the construction methodology, reconsidering Mother nature’s kinks and whims, pondering on better usage of science and technology for guessing any incipient danger that may come from environmental and climatic vicissitudes.
In those dark days of mid-June just a year ago, the rumor went around that the effect of the disaster could have been alleviated had Man been better equipped to answer such natural developments and, had we known the construction business better per se (building roads and houses only where they are allowed to be built, according to the rules of both the nature and technology).
It seems that Tbilisi has recovered from the calamity but some of the consequences still linger on. Millions are needed to compensate the victims of the flood, to reconstruct completely the damaged infrastructure, to buy and install the necessary sophisticated prognostication equipment, to conduct geological and seismological investigation, to guarantee safety from potential dangers, and to hire the specialists, both local or foreign, who will help us behave in due fashion in the future.
On the other hand, bad days like this reveal the character of the people. I have not seen in a long time our citizens so joined together and standing so strong in the face of the plight we all saw that night. I could not believe my eyes at seeing the young boys and girls en mass calmly, selflessly and tirelessly working hand-in-hand to save their beloved town, the dying animals, humans and buried-in mud property from the vicious embrace of raging nature. The heroism of the rescuers was amazing, too. The desperate but often helpless governmental services did not wink for a second before the problems popping up every minute in the days and nights on end following June 13. The entire country, including the youth, stood ready to help with money, labor, skills, clothing, and food.
This is all wonderful for boosting our pride, for feeling good and for temporary relief, but the biggest helper in the future would only be a scientifically corroborated and technologically guaranteed way of life throughout the whole country, not only in its capital. We need to know in exactly what kind of natural conditions we are living. This is, after all, the 21st century, a time of technological and scientific wonders. Georgia possesses a small land with an extremely disparate geographical and climatic patterns, where the frequent weather change is a routine of the day. We have in the past witnessed on our miniature territory numerous strong floods, snows, hailstorms, lightning strikes, landslides, earthquakes, heatwaves, freezes, winds and raging seas. This simply means that we need to be more careful when faced with this type of nature.
The night of 13 June this week, I watched breathlessly a newly released documentary on the television, depicting in detail last year’s disaster and marking its first anniversary. All the images and the accompanying anguish came back and struck my heart and mind all over again. And the concluding words of the narrator totally immobilized me: “In the fight between nature and man, man is always defeated.”
I am not prepared to deliberate on this philosophy right now but these words brought to my memory the disasters that have recently taken place in other parts of the world and are still fresh in mind.
It is true that when disasters happen somewhere else, it seems easier to endure them, but when they happen to us, only then do we start realizing much more acutely the plight and pain of those who succumb to the elements on an almost everyday basis throughout the world. Maybe the realization of those pains works as an incentive for us humans to help each other out, no matter how far away from each other we dwell and breathe.
Nugzar B. Ruhadze