Too Many People in Nature's Way

Ant writes "Wired News report that the dead and the desperate of New Orleans now join the farmers of Aceh and the fishermen of Trincomalee, villagers in Iran and the slum dwellers of Haiti in a world being dealt ever more punishing blows by natural disasters... ... "We rely on technology and we end up thinking as human beings that we're totally safe, and we're not," said Miletti, of the University of Colorado. "The bottom line is we have a very unsafe planet." By one critical measure, the impact on populations, statistics show the planet to be increasingly unsafe. More than 2.5 billion people were affected by floods, earthquakes, hurricanes and other natural disasters between 1994 and 2003, a 60 percent increase over the previous two 10-year periods, U.N. officials reported at a conference on disaster prevention in January. Those numbers don't include millions displaced by last December 2004's tsunami, which killed an estimated 180,000 people as its monstrous waves swept over coastlines from Indonesia's Aceh province to Trincomalee, Sri Lanka, and beyond. By another measure -- property damage -- 2004 was the costliest year on record for global insurers, who paid out more than $40 billion on natural disasters, reports German insurance giant Munich Re. Florida's quartet of 2004 hurricanes was the big factor. But generally it's not that more "events" are happening, rather that more people are in the way, said Thomas Loster, a Munich Re expert. "More and more people are being hit," he said..." I'd also like to point out a project here to find housing for Katrina's victims; it tries to combine lists of sites offering housing, and do a meta-search.

Comments

Re:why is this a bad thing?

[Pwnzerfaust]

I also see this as a good thing...there's no reason anyone should have stayed there. It's called Mandatory Evacuation for a reason. If you decide to ignore the warnings and stay there, then you shouldn't get any help from anyone...you created your own hell. As I see it, it helped free the human population of a couple thousand morons.

Re:A human engineerd disaster

[Blakey Rat]

Yeah, and here in we build our dikes 800' tall all around the entire country! And we embed flatscreen TVs in it so they aren't an eyesore. And our country has developed super instant freeze technology so when the water gets within 15 miles of the dikes, it's just instantly frozen! And the technology also makes angels fly and sing beautiful songs, and cute kittens fall from the sky!

Where the hell do you people come from? You know, the "holier than thou" Europeans? Go back there, your posts are annoying as all hell.

Blame Bill Clinton

[ccmay]

Democrat leaning Louisiana and overwhelmingly Democrat New Orleans was dead last on their partisan priority list and it showed.

Then what explains Bill Clinton's failure to fix these problems? He had eight years of peace and prosperity, even budget surpluses. It would have been much easier to fix the problems then, than after 9/11 and several years of recession.

Does Bill Clinton hate black people too? By the logic of the arguments I've heard put forward against Bush, there can be no other conclusion.

-ccm