The United Nations launched a drive on Thursday to "disaster-proof" schools to prevent children being crushed in earthquakes and swept away in floods. Tragedies like last years Pakistan quake, when collapsing classrooms killed 16,000 children, underlined the urgent need for action, UN disaster reduction chief Salvano Briceno said.

The two-pronged campaign will also push governments to make risk reduction part of the curriculum. "More than 200 million people are affected by disasters every year, a third of them are often children ... Educating about disasters can make the difference between life and death," Briceno told a launch ceremony in Paris. One person who knows this better than most is British schoolgirl Tilly Smith, who saved scores of lives in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami moments before the killer waves crashed into the Thai resort where she was staying.

Tilly, 11, urged people to flee the beach after she recognised the first signs of a tsunami -- something she had learnt in a geography class just two weeks previously. "The sea was bubbling. I was hysterical -- I was saying get off the beach theres going to be a big, big wave. I was very frightened -- I didnt know if I was going to survive," she told Reuters at the campaign launch.

"If it was not for my teacher I would probably be dead and so would my family. Briceno said the Indonesian island of Simeuleu was another example where education had saved lives. All but seven people survived the tsunami because knowledge about the warning signs had been handed down the generations. In nearby Aceh province 170,000 were left dead or missing.

In terms of infrastructure, building safe schools and "disaster proofing" existing ones is not expensive. Aid groups say it can cost as little as one or two dollars per child to strengthen a school against risks like quakes and cyclones. "In many hazard prone countries in the developing world its a matter of a few hundred dollars to make a school safer," Briceno said. In Bangladesh, which suffers massive flooding every monsoon season, all new schools are elevated from the ground and designed to double up as flood shelters.

The two-year campaign, called Disaster Prevention Starts at School, is organised by the UNs International Strategy for Disaster Reduction Secretariat and UNESCO, the U.N.s culture and education body, which hosted the launch at its Paris headquarters.
(Por Emma Batha, Planet Ark, 16/06/2006)