Natural Disasters
- Bangladesh Cyclones
The sheer population density of Bangladesh — 2,639 people per square mile — guarantees that any natural disaster in that South Asian nation will take a severe human toll. When Cyclone Sidr struck southern Bangladesh on Nov. 15, it was no different. Packing winds of over 100 mph, the storm took out power lines and trees, and pulverized mud-and-thatch homes. The death toll was over 1,000, with more than half a million people forced to flee their homes. But by Bangladesh's sad standards, Sidr was nothing — a cyclone in 1991 killed an astounding 140,000 people.
- Southeast U.S. Droughts
Water experts like to call drought the Rodney Dangerfield of natural disasters: It gets no respect. But the long dry that gripped much of the American Southeast this year is making everyone take notice. Normally verdant, Georgia and several neighboring states are suffering through their worst dry spell in recorded history. At one point the city of Atlanta, one of the fastest-growing metro areas in the U.S., had just three months of water left. As the drought worsened, it triggered a nasty legal fight between Florida, Georgia and Alabama over declining water supplies. The chief legacy of the 2007 drought will be this: It could well be water, not energy or oil, which finally constrains American growth.
- Mexico Floods
A natural disaster in a rich country like the United States can be an inconvenience. In an impoverished nation like Mexico, it is a human catastrophe. Massive floods that struck the southern Mexican states of Tabasco and Chiapas in late October and November left vast stretches of land completely submerged — an estimated 80% of Tabasco was under water at one point, and as many as one million residents were affected by the floods. Mexican President Felipe Calderon put it simply: "This is one of the worst natural disasters in the history of the country."
- Hurricane Felix
The U.S. got off lightly in the hurricane season of 2007, but not every country was so lucky. A Category 5 storm — the highest possible rating — Hurricane Felix slammed into Nicaragua on Sept.4 with winds that ranged up to 160 mph. The storm also hit Honduras and grazed the Caribbean islands. Altogether Felix killed 101 people, and pulverized the impoverished coastal communities of Nicaragua. One bright side — the storm hit heavily forested areas, which blunted the force of the winds.
- Indonesian Mud Volcano
It wasn't exactly an act of God — the blame should go to a poorly run natural gas drilling project — but the out-of-control mud flows near the Indonesian city of Surabaya certainly resembled something out of a disaster movie. The problem started in late May, when hot mud broke into a well that had been drilled without proper protective casing. When the company tried to stop up the mud with cement plugs, it eventually flowed to the surface and burst through the ground in a series of foul geysers. By October the mud was flowing at rate of about 170,000 cubic feet a day, utterly submerging neighboring villages and factories, and leaving over 10,000 people homeless.
- South Asia Floods
Subject to the monsoon rains, home to billions, South Asia is forever teetering between too little water and too much of it. This summer it was the latter. A series of abnormal monsoon rains in northern India, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh in July and August eventually led to what UNICEF called "the worst flood in living memory." By mid-August some 30 million people across the region had been displaced, and more than 2,000 would die in the floods. Damages were estimated to be at least $120 million, which was less a measure of the severity of the floods than the utter poverty of affected areas.
- North Korea Floods
Life in North Korea is one long, man-made disaster, and the full magnitude of human suffering that goes on north of the DMZ may never be known. But the world received a glimpse of the precarious state of the hermit kingdom in August, when wide-scale flooding afflicted the southern part of the country. Details are patchwork, but more than 400 people were believed killed, and the damage was extensive enough that the Mass Games, Pyongyang's yearly and freaky athletic showcase, were postponed. Even worse than the immediate damage was the destruction wrought on the starving country's farmland — the World Food Programme estimated that 450,000 tons of grain production was lost.
- Earthquake in Peru
2007 was a light year for earthquakes, but not in Peru. An 8.0 magnitude temblor hit the central coast of the South American nation on Aug. 15, leaving more than 500 people dead and 1,366 injured, and more than 50,000 homes destroyed. Much of the worst damage occurred in the city of Pisco, which was 80% destroyed. As many as 430 people died, including over 100 who were killed when a cathedral they were praying in collapsed.
- Greece Forest Fires
This was the summer that Greece burned. Through June, July and August, vicious heat waves, with temperatures exceeding 105°F, and lengthy droughts turned the country into a tinderbox. The worst fires occurred in August, when a series of sudden firestorms in Peloponnese, Attica and Euboea left nearly 70 people dead. Residents in Olympia, site of the ancient Olympics, had to be evacuated, along with citizens throughout the south of the country. Altogether the infernos burned nearly half a million acres.
- China Floods
Floods used to be a regular and catastrophic fact of life in wet southern China, where the mighty Yangtze River regularly burst its bounds in the spring. Anti-flood preparations and economic growth have helped limit the worst damage in recent years, but water won't be denied. This June days of drenching rain led to floods and landslides throughout southern China, including the prosperous manufacturing province of Guangdong. More than 60 people were killed and half a million were forced to flee their homes; economic damage was estimated at nearly $400 million.
|
Manmade Disasters
- Global Warming
Nobody doubts anymore that climate change is at least in part man-made. And even if the effects of global warming remain at the most benign end of the predicted range, it will be a disaster of unprecedented proportions. For years, that disaster has been unfolding so slowly that it's been invisible. But now you can see it: Mountain glaciers around the world are melting, along with North polar sea ice and the ice cap atop Greenland; droughts are baking the U.S. southwest, Australia and sub-Saharan Africa; floods are devastating Bangladesh; and Central America is reeling from powerful hurricanes. Not all of these events can be tied absolutely to global warming, but all of them will surely become more frequent and intense as the world warms — ultimately threatening the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people.
- Brazil Plane Crash
Aviators call São Paolo's Congonhas Airport "the aircraft carrier," because landing on its notoriously short runway, surrounded by densely populated residential areas, is as touchy as trying to put down on the deck of a ship at sea. Though a Brazilian court had banned large jets from the airport in February, citing safety concerns, the ban was later overturned. On July 17, the pilot of TAM Airlines Flight JJ3054, tried to land at Congonhas, but realizing he wouldn't be able to stop in time on the rain-slicked tarmac, tried to take off again. He failed. The Airbus A320 skidded across a road, smashed into a gas station and then into a building owned by the airline. The ensuing fireball killed all 186 people on the plane and 13 more on the ground, making this the worst air disaster in Brazilian history.
- Southern California Forest Fires
California has been ravaged by wildfires for thousands of years; they're an essential part of the natural ecosystem. But the fires that burned hundreds of square miles between Oct. 20 and Nov. 6 2007 - at the disaster's peak, 18 separate fires were burning, the worst of them in San Diego County — killing 10 people and forcing at least half a million more from their homes, weren't entirely natural. At least one, the Santiago Canyon blaze, was deliberately set, while two others — the Witch and Rice Canyon fires — were caused by downed power lines that ignited surrounding brush. Whether that brush should have been more thoroughly cleared, and whether people should be permitted to build homes in remote, fire-prone areas, are now matters of active debate, to say nothing of lawsuits.
- Yangtze River Dolphin Extinction
The Chinese called it baiji and "goddess of the Yangtze," and it was the only surviving member of a family of species that split off from saltwater whales and dolphins between 20 million and 40 million years ago. But now, according to a survey released in August, this rare freshwater mammal is almost certainly extinct — the first aquatic vertebrate species to disappear from the Earth in 50 years, and the first large mammal to fall victim to human impact. The multiple pressures: noisy boat collisions and dam construction that may have imperiled the sonar-driven animals, and overfishing — not for the dolphins themselves, but for river fish — with such indiscriminate techniques as netting, dynamite and powerful electric shocks. The disappearance of a top-level predator like the baiji — an indicator species that signals the health of its ecosystem — portends trouble for the Yangtze River and for the 400 hundred million people who depend on it.
- Minneapolis Bridge Collapse
Bridges failed in China and in Guinea, killing 64 and 70 people, respectively. But the disaster that really grabbed U.S. headlines was the collapse of the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis on Aug. 1, where the death toll reached only 9. The attention wasn't due only to Americans' interest in news that's closest to home. Rather, it was that the occurrence seemed so impossible: We think of our highways and other infrastructure as being so well built and so rigorously inspected and maintained as to be immune from such dramatic and sudden disintegration. But this tragedy probably resulted from a design imperfection when the bridge was built, followed by four decades of harsh weather and road salt, proving that nothing is failsafe.
- Utah Mine Collapse
For days afterward, mine owner Robert Murray insisted that it had been an earthquake — and indeed, seismologists confirmed that the earth had moved near Huntington, Utah, on Aug. 6. But the quake didn't cause the Crandall Canyon coal mine to collapse, trapping six miners inside. The quake was the collapse, as the mine, its walls weakened by decades of coal removal, gave way. Ten days later, three rescuers were killed by a second collapse, and shortly after that, attempts to reach the trapped men by drilling down from above were called off. The mine was sealed in October.
- North Korea Oil Pipe Explosion
The fanatically secretive North Korean government rarely reports internal problems, so it fell to aid organizations to get the news out: On June 9, an aging oil pipeline sprung a leak in North Pyongyang province. Local residents in the fuel-starved country rushed in to scavenge what they could — and then the oil caught on fire and exploded. At a minimum, 110 people died, but it's unlikely that the government will ever acknowledge the incident at all.
- Siberia Mine Explosion
Many of Russia's coal mines are aging, dilapidated and dangerous. The Ulyanovskaya mine, by contrast, located in the Kemerovo region of Siberia, about 2,000 miles east of Moscow, was less than five years old, and had modern safety features. None of that, however, was enough to prevent a massive methane explosion from ripping through the mine on Mar. 19, collapsing tunnels as the blast wave radiated from an epicenter nearly 900 ft. down. Working their way through smoke and flooded shafts, rescuers got more than 90 miners safely out — making the death toll of 107 a lot lower than it could easily have been.
- Mozambique Munitions Explosion
A stockpile of old ammunition, stored at a Mozambican army facility in the outskirts of the city of Maputo, blew up on Mar. 22, triggering fires and killing 117 people. According to the Mozambique Red Cross, heavy traffic in the area hampered the organizations attempts to rush volunteers to the site.
|
