Anytime I turn the television on, there’s some big catastrophe going on somewhere in America.
Floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, tornadoes, there always seems to be some tragic news story of an entire community getting wiped out.
So my question is this:
Do these things happen with the same frequency in other parts of the world, but we just don’t hear about them?
Do other countries far away suffer the same tragedies, but we only hear what happens at home, or is this just bad luck?
Earthquakes in China and Japan.
Monsoon flooding in Bangladesh.
Some big-ass tsunami down in Sri Lanka and southern India a few years back.
Famines in Africa.
Plenty of natural disasters go on in Asia that you could lose the entire death-roll from, say, New Orleans in and never find it once you’d blinked. Your domestic news agencies pay closer attention to your disasters at home, that’s all. It’s only to be expected.
Following on from Malacandra’s post, here’s Wikipedia’s List of natural disasters by death toll. The US leads in the categories of “Avalanche” (Wellington, 1910, 96 dead) and “Wildfire” (Peshtigo, 1871, 2000 dead), but these numbers pale in comparison to the 1931 China floods (1-4 million dead), the 1970 Bangladesh cyclone (200,000-500,00 dead), and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami (~285,000 dead).
If one expands “natural disasters” to include famines (millions of deaths on a regular basis) and diseases such as the Black Death (75 million deaths worldwide), the numbers are even greater.
It’s quite clear from that link that in terms of worldwide deaths due to natural disasters, the US contributes a very, very, very small drop in the bucket.
This has been an unusually bad weather year in the States. It does seem like there is a disaster every other day there right now, but that isn’t really normal.
On death toll maybe not, but on range of scary shit, the US has got to be up there.
Compared to my own country…
Hurricanes (well our are cyclones, but we both have 'em)…
Tornadoes (they happen here but rarely)
Wildfires (both countries)
But then the US strikes out on its own with earthquakes, avalanches (happen here but very rare), volcanoes, massive flooding of large population centres (our floods tend to only hit places like Bumblefuck West), and other freaky stuff.
Yeah, but they don’t do the heat-related stuff (drought, wildfire, etc) so well.
I think it has to be a large country that straddles several climate zones, and that gives us Australia, the United States, and (possibly) Canada. I think the US has it.
Actually, on edit: the Indonesians can burn shit right enough when they put a mind to it.
America isn’t the natural disaster capital but it is the media capital. Sensation depends on what the media decides to report.
There is no better example than the Peshtigo Fire of 1871. Peshtigo Fire
2000 dead!
But lo and behold, many people don’t even know about it. Why? The great Chicago Fire occurred the same day. There were far fewer casualties in the Chicago Fire but it was a lot more sensational.
Another example is the killing fields in Cambodia. Almost all of the journalists were gone so it didn’t get reported. Does that mean it didn’t happen?
The American media is capable of sensationalizing stories beyond their scope and ignoring or missing others. Pick your poison.
The US clearly has more tornadoes. They occur in most parts of the world, but the conditions in the so-called “tornado alley” of the US are particularly suited to generating them. Cecil gives figures of 700 tornadoes per year in the US, with Australia in second place at only 200, and 90 percent of the US twisters in a 300 mile wide central corridor from north Texas to Canada.
Other countries probably get the prizes for other things. Indonesia has the greatest concentration of volcanoes on the planet, for instance, according to the answer given in a recent trivia contest I was in. That might be debatable, but it’s certainly very high, and the prize has to go to some Pacific rim nation.
Ha, at least we don’t lead the world in scary snakes and spiders* that would love nothing more than to bite and bring misery to or kill big lumbering mammals. Give me tornados any day.
Funnel web spider {{SHUDDER}} I don’t care that they’ve only killed 13 people and the last one was in 1980. Fucking hell, they’re terrifying!
I do think it’s possible that the US has more different kinds of disasters, just because of its size and geographical variation. And we do seem to win on tornadoes. Third world countries do generally suffer more loss of life in a major disaster because of building construction, lack of infrastructure, and other issues.
