Disasters far away and close to home

[It's Gene]

As I watch disasters unfold halfway around the world with enormous, unimaginable loss of life, it is difficult to avoid comparing the situation there with the potential here.
And when I do, it is patently obvious that the biggest cause of death in disasters is the socioeconomic level of the victims.
The closest thing we've had recently to the Burmese cyclone would be Hurricane Katrina. Katrina devastated large swathes of a major American city, but unlike the villages in Burma there were few places completely wiped out and nothing close to the 38,000 fatalities seen so far in southeast Asia.
Nor have we ever seen hundreds of thousands of deaths from a single event like the Sumatran tsunami; nor even the 15,000 currently reported in China.
I find myself wondering what it will be like when the large earthquake hits here in the San Francisco Bay Area, the one that they predict with 99.7% certainty in the next 30 years. What will a 7.9 be like in the Bay Area? Will our casualties mount into the tens of thousands or more? Am I delusional for believing that we, in our affluent neighborhoods with higher building standards, will have fewer fatalities? That we'll be able to get a text message out, that we'll have broken dishes but not broken lives?
As I listened to Melissa Block's audio recording of the earthquake in progress, I was struck by the realization that it sounded exactly like the comparatively innocuous 5.6 we had in October; the same sounds of household items moving around and the creaking of walls -- except that our earthquake lasted 15 seconds, not 3 minutes.
Death tolls so high just make it difficult to imagine the victims, they become large numbers or abstract statistics.

[Curt]

It's the poor who bear the brunt of these things, always. Except, of course, when men are behind the mayhem. The twin towers were made to withstand any foreseeable natural disaster, but that's the subject of another discussion.

There are building techniques that are extremely resistant to earthquakes, tornadoes, and hurricanes. I will insert, here, a plug for Earthships (earthship.org) as an example. Already in the United States, most buildings could withstand that level of earthquake without collapsing and crushing people to death. It's important to remember that being crushed to death in a building is THE threat in any earthquake. Other than that, you'd have to be right on the fault line and fall into a crack in the earth to suffer anything worse than falling down.

As for the recent tsunami, had there been a way of transmitting the impending danger to those affected, and the danger WAS known in plenty of time, they could have simply walked to safety.

As for New Orleans, the tragedy there was TOTALLY preventable. The people living there were well aware that what happened with Katrina was more or less inevitable, given the state of the levees, but they continually voted down necessary improvements. Why? Because the people who could afford the taxes were not in danger, and those who couldn't afford them, COULDN'T AFFORD THEM! Or at least they felt that way when the catastrophe was a nebulous possibility. I'm sure they all feel a little differently now. Even the ones who thought they weren't in danger simply because their homes would be above the floodwaters, and then found out that their lives would actually be affected by the decimation of those less fortunate.

I'm reminded of the line in 'Fargo,' when Frances McDormand recites the litany of crimes perpetrated by the arrestee in the back of her squad car, and then says 'All for a little money.'

A little money is all it would take, truly. An early warning system for tsunamis, and maybe someday for earthquakes. No matter how crappy your hut or hovel is, if you can just manage to walk outside before the quake hits, you'll survive to build another. And it wouldn't be that hard or costly to make more quake resistant structures, people just have to care to do it!

Ah, there's the rub! Still, we can always hope and work for a better future.

[Jim Baker]

The closest to any major natural disaster I have been in was when Hurricane Floyd came close to Jacksonville Florida in 1999. We had almost a day's worth of notice yet the interstate was like a parking lot. If that storm would have come onshore at the wrong time, hundreds of thousands of people would have been sitting ducks. It was a good thing the hurricane stayed of shore (in Florida anyway) because there could have been many lives lost while we sat on the highways trying to leave the area.

I too think that the construction techniques we use in the U.S. are generally more earthquake and storm resistant than the shanties and huts that were hit by the the tsunamis, killing thousands. However, when I was a kid in school in Dallas I remember seeing maps of how much of the coast of California would be missing if a major earthquake hit there. It now is fairly clear that California won't fall into the ocean, but San Francisco and LA will one day be djacent to each other.

[Jim Baker]

Here's a powerpoint slide show of images (converted to PDF) that includes dialog about the earthquake in China that was sent to my sister from her friend, a Chinese scholar visiting at the SMU law school. I can't describe them better than his words that accompanied the email.

"Here is a PPT document sent to me by my Canadian friend who stayed in China for four years and loves China very much. I wept over the pictures again. Though nearly one month passed ever since it took place, all these pictures are still heartbreaking.

The natural disaster is devastating, but those heroes, with or without their names, are forever worth memorizing.

Bless you all, my friends!

Yunchuan"