Up to three months to draw up reconstruction plan - World Bank

 

The World Bank President James Wolfensohn said Wednesday it would take up to three months to draw up a detailed reconstruction plan for tsunami-hit nations, cautioning against rushing through with the massive effort.
He said communities ravaged by the December 26 earthquake and giant tidal waves along the Indian Ocean coast needed time to "heal" from the disaster before working together with the authorities to devise rehabilitation programs.
"To hurry the process without getting the people involved is probably not going to work," Wolfensohn said on his return to Washington after touring devastated areas in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the Maldives.

    They were among a dozen countries - including Thailand, India, Malaysia and Myanmar - hit by the disaster, caused by an undersea earthquake off Sumatra that unleashed towering waves, killing more than 156,000 people.
As many as five million people were thought to be homeless or without food and clean water.
 "I think (it will take about) a month or two or even three to fill in the details (of a comprehensive reconstruction plan). This is not a trivial disaster.
"This is something where they're starting from ground zero," said Wolfensohn, whose bank would spearhead the reconstruction programs.

He said one-half or one-third of the civil servants in areas hit by the disaster had perished, making it more difficult to rapidly draw up such a plan. Each country, he added, would take about two weeks to complete a preliminary assessment of the destruction that could give a "broad" view of requirements.

 
 
 
Wolfensohn also said the World Bank would introduce a cash grant program for many of the families reeling from the disaster.
"We have done this in certain other areas, and I have no doubt that we will be doing it in Sri Lanka and Indonesia as well, to try and get people something so they can buy clothes or food or whatever it is they need," he said.
The United Nations said it would require the biggest humanitarian aid operation in its nearly 60-year history to cope with the disaster and had appealed for 977 million dollars in immediate aid.
In Geneva on Tuesday, donors pledged 717 million dollars, including 250 million dollars from Japan, for emergency relief efforts, a total UN officials hailed as an unprecedented response to a natural disaster.
The World Bank itself had announced it would commit an initial 250 million dollars for emergency reconstruction and Wolfensohn said Wednesday that the amount could spiral up to one billion dollars to 1.5 billion dollars.
Wolfensohn said the World Bank was already meeting the needs of immediate reconstruction in some of the affected economies, such as restoration of power and water supplies and building of bridges and roads.
He cited as an example a recently signed 300 million dollar pact with Indonesia for implementation of such basic facilities. But rebuilding homes, for example, would be part of the comprehensive plan that would take weeks and months to develop, he said.
"When you have 100,000 homes destroyed, the question is where do you put the homes and in what sort of communal structure," Wolfensohn said. "At the moment, you don't even know how much of the community is left in many of these cases".