Impact
Tabasco was subject to heavy rain in late October and early November 2007, causing widespread flooding. As much as 80% of the state was under water. At least 20,000 people were forced to leave their houses in the search of emergency shelter. Over 1,000,000 residents have been affected.
The 2007 Tabasco flood not only destroyed many family houses and took away people’s belongings, but also affected theaters, libraries, artistic schools and museums. One of the buildings affected was the house of the poet Carlos Pellicer Cámara, which ended up under the water. The house where the poet lived his childhood is located in Narciso Sáenz 203, in the center of Villahermosa, Tabasco. Another historical house affected is located at 620 Calle Lerdo de Tejada, in Villahermosa, close to Carlos Pellicer’s house. The house once was occupied by José Gorostiza, the author of the ‘’Muerte sin fin’’ poem, his brother, the dramatist Celestino Gorostiza, and the man of letters Andrés Iduarte.
Economic impact at national levels will be insignificant. There is important damage in the fields which is causing increases in banana and cacao prices. The flood in Tabasco will not affect the economy in Mexico as much. Guillermo Ortiz Martínez, president of the Banco de México (the central bank), agrees that Mexico will not have excessive inflation because of the Tabasco flood. But some prices of products will increase such as banana and cacao. The General Peasant Confederation informed that because of the flooding, 100% of the harvests are lost. This represents an economic damage of US$480 million. President Felipe Calderón has sent seven thousand and five hundred people to help people in Tabasco. This is because of the major damage to roads, houses, and farms.
The flood destroyed agricultural production in the state of Tabasco, the largest producer of cocoa in the country and a major source of bananas, but is not expected that losses affect international prices, experts said on Friday. Tabasco produces 80% of all Mexico's cocoa and 40% of its bananas, according to Luis Rey Carrasco Linares, an expert from the Autonomous University of Chapingo with his squad in Tabasco. The heavy rains that punished the state for more than a week occurred during the cocoa harvest, which lasts from September to December, Carrasco said. All this year's harvest is under water and was lost, he added.The floods caused profound devastation to agriculture, which is a Principal source of Income in the state. The loss will have its greatest impact for the more than 30,000 families who earn their living in the production of cocoa, Carrasco said, adding that before the flood, farmers were grappling with a plague of fungus.
"The situation is extraordinarily serious: This is one of the worst natural disasters in the history of the country" said President Felipe Calderón in a televised address on the night of November 1, 2007.
The Tabasco flood caused the loss of thousands of books from the Villahermosa central library and 78 other libraries from five different municipalities. The Grijalva River affected the infrastructure and works of the José María Pino Suárez State Library where the entire vault is full of water. The water also flooded the auditorium causing widespread damage to furniture and equipment, rising to the second floor and damaging 15,000 books from the general collection.
Read more about this topic: 2007 Tabasco Flood
Famous quotes containing the word impact:
“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)
“Conquest is the missionary of valour, and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)