Although officials are still putting together damage reports from this year’s floods, the country appears to have made great strides in both preventing and then responding to natural disasters, officials said Monday.
“From a Red Cross point of view, and certainly from a coordination point of view—with the government taking the lead—it’s been really successful,” International Committee of the Red Cross Head of Delegation Anthony Spalton said Monday of alert and relief efforts.
This is the third year officials have been working to coordinate their responses to the annual rainy-season floods. The country has already improved its performance from the year 2000, when record flooding devastated the land, Spalton said.
According to government statistics, at least 29 people died from this year’s floods. But disaster-relief officials say the toll could have been worse had it not been for the country’s preparedness.
The National Committee for Disaster Management, along with several aid agencies, is scheduled to begin compiling data on the flood damage, which authorities hope to have early next week, Spalton said.
However, this information will be “provisional” and “fairly crude”—in other words, it will only help authorities to determine which areas are in desperate straits and then rush help to them, Spalton said.
A more extensive assessment will be put together later in the year, when authorities try and figure out how devastating this year’s drought was, Spalton said.
Before the floods, the drought —Cambodia’s worst since 1995—kept nearly 63 percent of the rice paddies unsown, the government reported.
The nation’s response once the floods hits was also impressive, officials said.
The Cambodian Red Cross was able to pull together more than $100,000 in aid and several tons of rice, Red Cross spokeswoman Men Neary Sopheak said.
