Future Disasters May Cause Grimmer Catastrophes Due To Changed Living Patterns Of People
By djain128, Section Gurgaon News
Posted on Sun Jan 02, 2005 at 10:54:26 PM EST
In seven hours last week, great ocean waves scoured shores from Thailand to Somalia, exacting a terrible price in wealth and human lives. But unimaginable as it may seem, future catastrophes may be far grimmer. Many more such disasters -- from earthquakes and volcanic eruptions to floods, mudslides and droughts -- are likely to devastate countries already hard hit by poverty and political turmoil.
The world has already seen a sharp increase in such "natural" disasters -- from about 100 a year in the 1960s to as many as 500 a year by the early 2000s, said Daniel Sarewitz, a professor of science and society at Arizona State University. But it is not that earthquakes and tsunamis and other such calamities have become stronger or more frequent. What has changed is where people live and how they live, say experts who study the physics of such events or the human responses to their aftermath.
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As new technology allows, or as poverty demands, rich and poor alike have pushed into soggy floodplains or drought-ridden deserts, built on impossibly steep slopes, and created vast, fragile cities along fault lines that tremble with alarming frequency.
In that sense, catastrophes are as much the result of human choices as they are of geology or hydrology. Kerry Sieh, a veteran seismologist at the California Institute of Technology, has spent years studying some of the world's wealthiest and poorest earthquake-prone territories -- not only the faults off Sumatra's west coast that caused last week's tsunami, but also California's San Andreas fault, which could, with a sudden twitch, submerge the inhabitants of some of the most valuable land on Earth.
The difference between the rich and poor countries, Sieh said, was that the rich ones had improved their building techniques and political systems to deal with inevitable disasters.
Civilisation has pushed into uninhabitable areas. Rich nations have better buildings, but congested cities in poor countries are rubble in waiting. In Los Angeles, a 7.5 quake might kill 50,000 people; in Tehran, it would kill over a million And bad planning: Study found less than 10% of money spent on disaster relief goes to preventive measures.
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Deepak Jain
