It Only Seems the World Is Getting an Unusual Share of Catastrophes Recently, Disaster Professor Says
October 24, 2005
First it was last year’s tsunami, then hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the earthquake in India and Pakistan and most recently, Hurricane Wilma. While to many, that seems like an unusual, even unfair, number of disasters in such a brief time, a University of Richmond disaster sciences professor says the string is not unusual at all.
“I track events,” said Walter G. Green III, associate professor of emergency services at the university’s School of Continuing Studies. “I see five to 10 events a day that you would consider to be a disaster. Once every two days I see a major disaster, and once a week I see a catastrophe.”
“The problem is, you don’t hear about most of them,” Green said, “because they occur in the Third World, and we’re not interested.”
“There was a recent flood in the north of England, Green said, “with cars floating, train lines blocked and lots of damage. There were bird culls in Romania and Turkey, and the Brazilian army was working on drought relief in the Amazon basin.
“The American news doesn’t consider that important.”
Also, “Once a week there’s a bad mining accident,” Green said. “Once a week, there’s a bad ferry accident, with people dying. Most people think the Titanic was the worst maritime disaster. Actually the Philippines ferry Dona Paz left 4,300 people dead in a 1987 accident.
“There’s a constant drumbeat of stuff happening.”
“Sometimes it captures our attention, particularly on a slow news day,” Green said. “Even the catastrophe in northern India and northern Pakistan would have received even less attention on the wrong day.
“Routinely, tropical cyclones kill 500,000 or more. The Yellow River flood of 1887 resulted in the deaths of two million people in China.”
While there are always disasters occurring, Green is concerned that global warming is creating more and more disasters. “There have been major warnings,” he said. “The ice packs are melting. It’s very troubling.”
“By the end of the century, places high and dry will be under water. Entire nations in the Pacific Islands will disappear.” Parts of Australia and New Zealand are at risk, he said. So is Alaska, where “villages will fall into the sea.”
“The Pacific Northwest scares me,” he added, being susceptible either to earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, or both.
And the U.S. East coast is in danger of being “fatally screwed up,” he said, particularly in coastal cities and places with barrier island systems. “So many things we’ve done to stop beach erosion actually helps it.
“And the costs will mount. There are more people living in dangerous areas, and their property is worth more. Ten years ago disaster bills were $10 billion to $15 billon. The World Trade Center bill was $50 billion, and it’s about $200 billion for Katrina. We’ll hit $500 billion.”
Green teaches emergency services management and disaster science to undergraduates and graduate students at Richmond. His Disaster Database Project tracks the global history of disasters from hurricanes in Florida to the tsunami in the Indian Ocean. It can be found online at http://cygnet.richmond.edu/is/esm/disaster/.