Been a busy couple of days. As I had expected the first diversions of transportation have started in order to support Earthquake relief in Pakistan. While I understand the need, it could not have come at a worse possible time in terms of competing requirements. Earthquake relief will ( and should) win out, and we will flex as best as we can, but this little drill is starting to get old. More to follow I am sure.
Which got me to think a little bit. What a year this has been! First was the Tsunami, followed by floods and earthquakes in various countries, plus the London bombing now followed up by the (2nd) Bali bombing. Look at the toll in earthquakes alone:
Date Location Magnitude
Feb. 5 Celebes Sea 7.1
March 2 Banda Sea 7.1
March 28 Northern Sumatra, Indonesia 8.7
June 13 Tarapaca, Chile 7.8
June 15 Off coast of northern California 7.2
July 24 Nicobar Islands, India 7.3
And of course, now the earthquake in Pakistan.
Hurricanes, bombings, wars, earthquakes, pandemics. It just seems like it never lets up this year. By my inaccurate math at least 80,000 people have been killed due to the wrath of mother nature this year. That number is actually on the low side which makes the toll all the more troublesome. One can’t pick up a paper these days without reading about a disaster somewhere and the monumental relief effort that is being organized to clean up the wreckage.
And then of course, there is the little matter of the war. By all accounts 20,000 Iraqis have died as well as 2000 brave Americans and 50 British. And it is still going.
Its just too much sometimes.
I do know that the pace of these types of things only seems accelerated. If you go back to the 1920’s or 1930’s they had an equal number of disasters then.
The difference being that you only read about them in the newspapers. Now in the age of instant information its always right in front of you.
Maybe someone needs to apoligize to Mother Nature. It would seem she is mad at mankind. Perhaps, for not yet finding a saner way to run this planet.
