6. Conclusions and Recommendations
6.1 Preparation of the MRC Annual Flood
Report 2005 - Lessons learned
More information on response to flood events is contained in
the annexes for each of the LMB countries. A summary is presented
below.
- There are multiple locations of data: administrative levels
such as in villages (communes), districts and provinces and
technical levels such as in departments of agriculture, public
works, health, etc. Additionally some NGOs may have interesting,
but generally very local, data. Some of those data are consolidated
at province levels (generally through the institutions in
charge of disaster management including the National Red Cross
agencies).
- Most of the affected provinces prepare lists presenting
consolidation of damage from flood. Those lists however are
not standardised, resulting in well detailed indicators in
some provinces and the same indicators not monitored at all
in other provinces. Units are not necessarily identical, eg
some reports consider damage to roads in numbered sections
and others in kilometres.
- The meaning of the terms used for describing the indicators
may vary from one list to another, eg, "Number of affected
people" may refer to people having been flooded for a
few days with very little damage or to people who lost all
their rice production. It is not always clear that "Area
of rice damaged by flood" refers to a full loss of production
or a decrease in yield.
- The financial estimate of damage is rarely exhaustive.
Some damages are evaluated in order to obtain the budget for
repairs. However, when no external fund is accessible, other
than the recurrent maintenance budget, no accounting is made
available. Some provinces, reported a lack of expertise for
making such an assessment.
- In the available lists of damage, it is not always clearly
understandable if some data are "not available"
or "zero" or "little damage". Very often,
only "blanks" appear on the lists. If data are missing,
additions are obviously biased.
- The data are rarely centralised at a national level, and
even if they are, there are doubts about the reliability of
such consolidation when examining the poor coherence of the
data collected locally. Experience also shows that meeting
with the provinces is the only reliable way to assess the
data, and, thorough discussion is needed to better understand
the meaning of the data and to fill in the gaps.
- Nearly all documents are (obviously) written in the national
languages and very little information is available in English.
All these factors make the consolidation of information at
LMB level very problematic.