Disasters far away and close to home

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

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.

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