Destruction construction – The bright-ish side to disasters

By Naomi Conrad

Eerie red light spilt from whirring electrical heaters onto the uneven pavements of the main street from the windows of the bare Barclays bank, stripped of its cash machines, disconnected, twisted cables crawling over the still damp wooden floorboards. It seeped from under a bordered up door of an forsaken fish and chips shop, illuminating the silhouettes of a toppled counter and empty shelves, wooden planks stacked in a corner awaiting the next day’s building frenzy. It leaked out of an empty hotel whose pub had remained abandoned for months, collecting into flickering pools of light below the post box; an apologetic sign warning that it was out of order and to please make ones way to another box just round the corner, along a bridge too damaged to be used by cars, above the flood line.

Below the flood line, the light of the next day transformed the uncanny, ghostly red light district into a hum of hectic building activity, parking along the main street reserved for those involved in the reconstruction efforts, building containers piled high.  - Cockermouth, a small village in the quaint Lake District, is rebuilding its main street after the floods last November, which pulled bridges and trees down in its gurgling torrential wake and gushed into the ground floors of houses and shops. The shiny new Boots branch was first to re-open, followed by Wordsworth House, where the poet William once lived. The host of golden daffodils is meagre this year, as Wordsworth garden was flooded, a few lonely snow drops pocking through the muddy earth, surrounded by a fenced off, partially collapsed wall.

Yet while many shops, hotels and pubs below the slimy flood line remain closed, their owners fretting over insurance claims and reconstruction efforts, others are picking up the dampened business. The owner of a Bed and Breakfast has not had a single weekend off since late November, as people flood in for Sunday roasts and dry beds that are not sprouting mould. – Business has temporarily moved to make-shift shops in an old barn and those more lucky to be located above the damage demarcation line, yet it is another sector that is truly booming: as after many a natural disaster, with homes, bridges and infrastructure cracked, swept away or reduced to rubble, the construction sector is kept extremely busy. The silver lining, as it were.

The cloud that has been hanging over Chile ever since it was struck by a devastating earthquake in February has the same dusty-silver lining. Building firms are presumably rubbing their hands in glee, as schools, houses, bridges and hospitals, many of them reduced to rubble, need to be rebuilt or torn down. Chile’s vineyards and pulp industry have also been severely battered. The country’s economy is assumed to bounce back quickly, on the wake of this concerted reconstruction effort. Expecting a huge construction boom, some investors have even upgraded their growth forecasts for the country. Fortunately, according to the BBC, the country’s copper mines remained largely unscathed. With copper prices high on the international market, Chile’s main export is likely to bring the necessary dividends to pay for this reconstruction.

However, as the bulldozers and cement mixers move in to turn the wreckage and rubble once again into functioning infrastructure and homes, some are concerned whether they shouldn’t be planting trees instead, at least in Haiti. In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Pais, the Minister of External Relations of the Dominican Republic, Carlos Morales Troncoso made a desperate plea to concentrate the construction efforts in neighbouring Haiti on reforestation. Over the decades, his reasoning went, Haitians had cut down many of the island’s trees for cooking and heating, leaving the earth unable to retain water and thus making intensive farming impossible and floods more likely. Given the level of destruction after the earthquake, many people have fled into the remaining forests in search of food and refuge, cutting down trees and thus speeding up the process of deforestation and desertification. Yet, so Troncoso, without more intensive farming methods desperately impoverished Haiti would be forced to continue to depend on food aid and floods would become ever more murderous. The solution? Plant trees, build houses and subsidise natural gas for cooking stoves, as the Dominican Republic has done with great success. Presumably, given the extent of the devastation and destruction in Haiti, the list should also include importing cooking stoves at some point. 

Cooking stoves may not be a mayor concern for Cockermouth, Cumbria or Chile. Yet they may provide food for thought, thoughts about how to prevent disasters, how to channel reconstruction efforts and to whom and to what building projects – trees, flood barriers or shopping centres.  Wordsworth House is probably busily planting a host of golden daffodils for Prince Charles’ royal visit at the end of March, when he will visit the poet’s house – and plant a tree.