<
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/13/opinion/earthquake-natural-disaster.html>
"Each day, the reported death toll from the earthquake in Turkey and Syria
grows. It’s not just a local tragedy killing people far away. Natural disasters
have struck, and will strike, around the world — including in the United
States. What are their repercussions? What lessons can be learned from them?
Perhaps the most salient is this: Bad luck is inevitable and we must anticipate
and prepare for it.
To Americans, our first association with earthquakes may be the one that
destroyed San Francisco in 1906. It killed an estimated 3,000 people, but there
have been at least eight documented earthquakes since the year 1500 with death
tolls over 100,000 — including the 1923 Tokyo earthquake that killed 143,000
people, topped by one that killed nearly a million people in China in 1556.
As lethal as earthquakes are volcanic eruptions. Much more deadly than the 1980
Mount St. Helens eruption that killed 57 Americans were the eruptions of
Vesuvius in A.D. 79, of Krakatoa in 1883, of Santorini that may have undermined
Crete’s Minoan civilization and the 1902 eruption that killed about 30,000
people within a few minutes on the Caribbean island of Martinique.
Our catalog of natural disasters continues with tsunamis (more than 200,000
dead, mostly on Sumatra, in 2004), floods (recently inundating much of
Bangladesh and Pakistan), and fires and droughts (think of California and
Australia today). Other types of disasters include epidemics (like the medieval
Black Death and the 1918 flu), famine and wars."
Via Bill Daul.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
