More and more people are moving into more and more dangerous regions. From Too Many People in Nature’s Way:
By one critical measure, the impact on populations, statistics show the planet to be increasingly unsafe. More than 2.5 billion people were affected by floods, earthquakes, hurricanes and other natural disasters between 1994 and 2003, a 60 percent increase over the previous two 10-year periods, U.N. officials reported at a conference on disaster prevention in January.Those numbers don’t include millions displaced by last December’s tsunami, which killed an estimated 180,000 people as its monstrous waves swept over coastlines from Indonesia’s Aceh province to Trincomalee, Sri Lanka, and beyond.
By another measure — property damage — 2004 was the costliest year on record for global insurers, who paid out more than $40 billion on natural disasters, reports German insurance giant Munich Re. Florida’s quartet of 2004 hurricanes was the big factor.
But generally it’s not that more ‘events’ are happening, rather that more people are in the way, said Thomas Loster, a Munich Re expert. ‘More and more people are being hit,’ he said.
In the 1970s, only 11 percent of earthquakes affected human settlements, researchers at Belgium’s University of Louvain report. That soared to 31 percent in 1993 to 2003, including a quake in 2003 that killed 26,000 people in Iran, whose population has doubled since the ’70s.
The expanding U.S. population ‘has migrated to hazard-prone areas — to Florida, the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, particularly barrier islands, to California,’ noted retired U.S. government seismologist Robert M. Hamilton, a disaster-prevention specialist. ‘Several decades ago we didn’t have wall-to-wall houses down the coast as we do now.’
In some cases, poorer nations handle national disasters better than richer nations:
- No one was reported killed when Ivan struck Cuba in 2004, its worst hurricane in 50 years and a storm that, after weakening, killed 25 people in the United States. Cuba’s warning-evacuation system is minutely planned, even down to neighborhood workers keeping updated charts on which residents need help during evacuations.
- Along Bangladesh’s cyclone coast, 33,000 well-organized volunteers stand ready to shepherd neighbors to raised concrete shelters at the approach of one of the Bay of Bengal’s vicious storms.
- In 2002, Jamaica conducted a full-scale evacuation rehearsal in a low-lying suburb of coastal Kingston, and fine-tuned plans afterward. When Ivan’s 20-foot surge destroyed hundreds of homes two years later, only eight people died. Ordinary Jamaicans also are taught search-and-rescue methods and towns at risk have trained flood-alert teams.