Australia-Canada Red Cross to Clean Up Maldives
Date: 18-May-05
Country: AUSTRALIA
Author: James Grubel
The Australian and Canadian Red Cross will spend $8.5 million on an 18-month project to dispose of the waste, which has built up across 70 islands in the Maldives and which now poses a major health risk for many of the country's 300,000 inhabitants.
"It is just a chronic problem," Red Cross project officer Selina Chan told Reuters from the remote Indian Ocean island chain off the toe of India.
The Maldives relies heavily on income from tourists visiting its famed coral reefs, beaches and resorts.
Ten of the archipelago's 90 resorts were destroyed by waves that washed over some of the islands, leaving 108 people dead or missing.
Almost 230,000 people died across 13 nations around the Indian Ocean rim after the tsunami, which was triggered by a massive undersea earthquake off Indonesia's Sumatra island.
Chan said debris from destroyed buildings remained piled up on beaches on many of the Maldives' islands, alongside concrete, asbestos, drums of waste oil and rusting building materials which leak into the groundwater.
She said the rising piles of garbage were a problem on some outlying islands before the tsunami. But the extra debris has posed new problems, with waste no longer washing out to sea from dumping sites.
"The tsunami has made it a lot worse. Whatever rubbish was on the islands is being picked up by the waves and dumped back onto the islands. The tsunami, with so much destruction, has added onto that."
Chan said the Red Cross programme would help sort the debris and rubbish on all the islands, with many of the materials to be recycled to help the nation rebuild.
Red Cross Australia chief executive Robert Tickner said the aid organisation had supplied blankets and plastic sheeting for 10,000 people in the Maldives as well as medical supplies and other shelter materials such as corrugated iron roofing.
It has also sent 32 generators to tsunami-affected islands, allowing those without power to run desalination plants for fresh water.
In March, an Australian government report said the Maldives' coral reefs survived the tsunami almost unscathed.