I have been poking around on the Net and cannot really find good data. Is it me, or is North America the recipient of an inordinately high percentage of the world’s serious natural disasters? I’m not talking about Monsoon Season in Asia or such. I mean natural disasters like tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes and such.
I guess I am asking about weather related disasters. Mountains all have avalanches, so the Alps are no more unique than the Rockies in that particular regard. But heck, it appears that weather patterns on the planet conspire to send truly awful stuff towards North America.
True? Not? Between the hurricanes that form off the coast of Africa and El Nino in the Pacific, we do get more than our fare share. Yes?
Not true. It’s a matter of coverage. You just don’t see very much on severe flooding, earthquakes, etc outside of North America. Death tolls in North America have been pretty trivial compared to other regions.
The most severe flood in the US was Galveston in 1900, with 6,000 lives lost. Compare this to the death tolls in China in 1931 - 3,000,000 due to a combination of flooding and famine - or Bangladesh, 300,000 in 1971 and 130,000 in 1991. And so on for other disasters. There’s just no comparison.
Yes, because of the unusual topography of the Great Plains relative to the Rockies. But that’s about it. We don’t get monsoonal rains or giant sandstorms, however.
The country with the most tornadoes per unit area is England . See paragraph six here. OK there are not so intense as in the US but, as you can see , they still occur in other parts of the world.
Earthquakes are pretty much the norm among Indonesia, due to it being located on the plate faults.
I not sure if haze is considered as a disaster, but over here in Southeast Asia, it is almost an annual event. In some places, like Malaysia, it gotten so bad that people need to wear mask and visibility is reduced to a point that driving is dangerous.
But some years are are many more in the UK . To quote from Torro :-
*In Britain on 21 November 1981 as many as 105 tornadoes broke out in five-and-a-half hours as a cold front crossed a comparatively small part of England from north-west to south-east.
*
I would think that ruling out “Monsoon season” would be the same as ruling out “Hurricane season”. While the term “monsoon” can be used to refer to the summer or winter months when areas of Asia receive large amounts of rain, the mass casualties we think of as being a result of monsoons are almost always caused by discrete, specific events such as landslides, floods, etc.
And if we’re talking weather-related disasters, the biggest of them all in terms of both lives and economic impact has got to be drought. Droughts have been fairly rare in North America, and more easily accomodated than some of the droughts that have killed millions in the Sahel and Asia.
Comparing death counts isn’t a real valid way of documenting natural disasters. As we saw in New Orleans, death is often the result of poverty - flimsy housing, population density, etc. The death tolls from hurricanes in the U.S. would be much larger if we didn’t have cars, highways to escape on, and millions and millions of people living on top of each other in disaster-prone regions.
To answer the OP, it is a toss up between North America and South East Asia mainly because of hurricanes and earthquakes. The U.S. has tornadoes, but destruction is localized, while SE Asia has wide scale flooding. I guess on that last point I’d say SE Asia is worse.
There is famine in Africa, but it could be argued that famine is equally a political problem as it is a natural one.
Agreed. I was trying to limit it to purely natural events. It’s hard to argue that famine is solely natural. Gotta admit, having read the posts here, that trying to eliminate monsoons was wrong.
It is appalling to think that 3,000,00 Chinese died in 1931 and that didn’t immediately leap to mind as I was considering this thread’s OP.
Number of deaths does not equal frequency or number of storms per year a region gets. As has been said, it points to poverty, lack of building/construction codes, etc, etc, but that doesn’t mean that places which have higher death tolls have more storms.
Not to get all GD, but there are those that say most of the deaths in New Orleans are a result of politics, not flooding. You could basically make the same argument about almost any natural disaster. We know that places like the California coast, much of Japan, and Instanbul are at great risk for a massive earthquake. It’s a matter of politics and economics that those place are not safely vacant. With enough political will, areas prone to earthquakes or hurricanes could be permanently vacated and the effect of things like tornadoes could be minimized with appropriate building codes, just like we could virtually eliminate the consequences of drought in Africa if we applied ourselves. I’m not saying it’s really feasible to zone every fault zone as uninhabitable; I’m just saying there is a political/economic component to the effect of any natural disaster. If the OP chooses to ignore droughts because the effects could be smaller than they are, that smacks of adjusting the data to fit your thesis.
-cocks an eyebrow carefully-. Easy, now. This is neither GD not the Pit. I did not chose to omit drought. I did not mean to adjust anything, I was asking a decent question so that a dialogue could be opened. I must agree, drought is a massively serious issue- even if it’s not as serious in North America as it is elsewhere.
My goal was not to be Americentric in any manner, but to ask whether or not my exposure to news and therefore my view of natural disasters was accurate. I freely admit now that it was not.
However, I did not purposely omit any particular disaster from my OP in an attempt to spin the resulting answers.
Right, and I didn’t mean to accuse you of anything. I was merely commenting on Lamar’s distinction between political and natural causes. My comment about “adjusting the data” was not an accusation but simply pointing out the consequences of making decisions about what data is relevant.
The old saw about lies, damn lies, and statistics is quite true in this kind of area. You could probably manipulate the stats to whatever outcome you want while remaining perfectly true and defensible. If you choose to exclude certain kinds of disasters, you obviously shift the focus elsewhere. If you choose to use a metric like lives lost, you shift the stats toward areas with poor infrastructure and lack of responders. If you choose to use a metric like dollar value of destruction, you shift the focus toward rich nations that have more to destroy in the first place. Any choice you make in posing your question risks biasing the outcome. That’s not a criticism of you asking the question in the first place, just a caveat.
Point well taken. Actually, I guess my OP didn’t have a metric to measure by- since I didn’t qualify or quantify with such things as dollars or dead people.
Perhaps I have asked a question that in fact has no straightforward answer… :dubious:
Why no hurricanes for Oregon and say, Seattle? Has Los Angeles ever been threatened by one?
I am sure this has something to do with the way a hurricane is formed and grows but my son asked me this today and I couldn’t answer him factually. So, why only hurricanes in the Atlantic/Gulf region?
Sorry to make this Americ-centric and all, and it is slightly OT, but I do really want to know…
This is neither GD not the Pit. I did not chose to omit drought. I did not mean to adjust anything, I was asking a decent question so that a dialogue could be opened. I must agree, drought is a massively serious issue- even if it’s not as serious in North America as it is elsewhere.