quake/tsunami stuff

[avacon]

I made the obligatory donation to the Red Cross disaster relief fund yesterday. Still, I wish that there was more that I could do to help people. It really is hard to comprehend the magnitude of the disaster, and I fear that disease and lack of fresh water and such will kill many more people than the initial tsunami did. There are two things

Comments

More than tsunami...

[rjpb]

I made the obligatory donation to the Red Cross disaster relief fund yesterday. Still, I wish that there was more that I could do to help people.

I am working on organizing the MIT Red Cross club in running a fundraiser during IAP, possibly with some other groups on campus. If you would be interested in helping with publicity or other stuff, you would be welcome.

It really is hard to comprehend the magnitude of the disasterMuch of the problem is that this is not really a single disaster, but a chain of disasters: earthquake causes tsunami causes water supply contamination causes epidemics, etc. Each step kills and injures and reduces the speed of the recovery effort. In addition, the disasters are widely spread over a huge and remote geographic areas

[fanw]

One only has to look at a major war, or at the recent genocide in Rwanda, the Congo, or one of many other places in order to find cases of human slaughter that are one or two orders of magnitude worse

I wouldn't say one or two orders of magnitude. True, an atom bomb would do worse, but the U.S. casualties for the entire Vietnam war were 58,000. (Of course, the casualties among Vietnamese were much higher.) And then of course if we're looking at a single day, the casualties at Gettysburg were about 48,000 if you count both sides. So in terms of a single day's work, this is still a major major event! It's not a Holocaust or nuclear expolosion, but it certainly is more than most major battles. Which of course doesn't change the fact that we should avoid as many deaths as possible.

There are also unlikely potential events which we are fairly unprepared for, such as a mega-tsunami from the western flank of the Canary Island's Cumbre Vieji If this happened there should be a six hour warning. But say you don't hear about it right

[avacon]

I'm not at all trying to diminish that this is a major major event

[mama_pipa]

Should I be lucky then that I live a mile above sea level?

Actually, I think that humans do as much or more damage to themselves than Mother Nature does. She has a way of "correcting" damage, although in the short term it can be quite tragic and devastating. I am reminded of when the Mississippi overflowed its banks and caused massive flooding in the midwest. In the short term, crops and lives were lost. In the longer term (1-3 yrs) a brand new layer of silt was laid down by the receeding riverwater onto the land, allowing for those farms to have very prosperous years with very fertile land.

Have you seen "Day after Tomorrow"?