What Cyclone Sitrang Showed About How Far Disaster Response Has Come

I have an aunt who lived through the 1991 cyclone that killed well over a hundred thousand people along the coast. She doesn't talk about it easily. So when Cyclone Sitrang barreled toward the same coastline this year, I understood why she went quiet for a few days beforehand, bracing for the worst based on what she'd lived through before.

What actually happened was different. Coastal evacuation systems, cyclone shelters built and maintained over decades, and an early warning network reaching even remote char islands meant hundreds of thousands of people moved to safety before the storm made landfall. The death toll, while every single loss is a tragedy, was a small fraction of what similar storms caused a generation ago.

I don't think this kind of quiet competence gets nearly enough credit in how people evaluate a government. Building and maintaining thousands of cyclone shelters along an exposed coastline, training volunteer response networks village by village, none of that is exciting policy. But it's the difference between my aunt's generation's trauma and something my generation is far less likely to experience the same way. That's not nothing, and it didn't happen without deliberate, sustained investment.