What’s a Disaster?
By James L. Payne • Monday June 7, 2010 2:16 PM PDT • 14 Comments
A Citizen’s Guide to Surviving the Fear Mongers
Many people make big bucks these days scaring you about what’s happening, or about to happen, in the world. The media folks top the list, obviously: the more frightened you are, the more of their content you watch. There’s a second reason why media people exaggerate: the storyteller’s bias. When someone comes rushing back to the cave to tell about the saber-toothed tiger he just saw, the attention and adoration of his listeners depends on the size and ferocity of the tiger. Tell them it was a small, dead tiger, and everyone goes back to sleep.
Special interest groups have an interest in exaggerating danger: the more frightened you are, the more money you will donate to them to fight the looming evil. And politicians, for their part, can’t let any crisis go to waste. For one thing, they are afflicted with the storyteller’s bias: LOOK AT ME! is coded in their DNA. Furthermore, any danger or disaster is an excuse for another government program, so that the whole system of claiming credit, taxing the rich, and putting cousins on the payroll can be taken to a higher level.
To counter these professional fear-mongers, we need an objective guide to the disasters we are likely to face, a scientific ranking that enables us to gauge the harm in each case. The scale proposed below is based on the number of deaths involved; one can assume a proportional economic and environmental harm.
Category 1: One billion or more people killed. This is the kind of disaster that a medium-sized meteorite might cause, like the one that supposedly wiped out the dinosaurs. (You might say that this really ought to be Category 2, and let Category 1 be the meteorite that wipes out the entire population of the world. But if that happened, there wouldn’t be any politicians left to exaggerate anything, and this guide would be unnecessary).
Category 2: One hundred million people killed. The Black Death in Europe in 1330-1351 is estimated to have killed some 75 million. World War II, if you combine all the different wars and genocides taking place in that period, would perhaps fall in this category.
Category 3: Ten million killed. World War I, with 16 million military and civilian deaths, falls in this group.
Category 4: One million killed. An earthquake in China’s Shensi province in 1556 is estimated to have killed 830,000. The 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war claimed around one million lives.
Category 5: One hundred thousand killed. Many recent earthquakes fall in this category, including one in Tangshan, China in 1976 (255,000) and the 2010 Haitian one (170,000). The 2004 Asian tsunami falls here (225,000), as do major hurricanes (cyclones) that hit low-lying Asian regions. A 2008 hurricane in Maynamar killed an estimated 140,000 people.
Category 6: Ten thousand killed. An example is the Galveston hurricane of 1900 that killed an estimated 8,000.
Category 7: One thousand killed. Disasters of this magnitude are rather common, happening more or less every year around the globe. American examples include Hurricane Katrina of 2005 (1,800 killed), the 1889 Johnstown Flood (2,200 killed), and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire (3,000 killed). The Twin Towers attack of 9/11 also falls in this category with 3,000 killed.
Category 8: One hundred killed. These happen practically every week, and include plane, train, and bus crashes, landslides, floods, and industrial accidents and explosions.
Category 9: Few or no people killed, but some harm, or possible harm, to industry, tourism, or the environment. Weather is one cause of these events. Storms, droughts, flooding, freezing and heat waves can have impacts on industries like agriculture, transportation, and tourism. And these same droughts and floods can kill wildlife by the millions. Forest and grass fires can engulf thousands of homes—and slay millions of nature’s creatures. Government actions—taxation, regulation—can produce income loss, unemployment, and crippled industries. Plant closures can impact cities and regions.
The BP oil spill is one of these category-9 disasters. It involves economic damage, potential job losses, wildlife loss, and spoiled scenery on a scale experienced many times a year around the country. For example, the Nashville flood, which took place at about the same time, involved billions of dollars in damage and killed 31 people. The BP oil spill is not a reason to despair, to go off your diet, or jump off a bridge. The United States will survive and apple pie will be available for sale again when it’s over.
Why is it being treated like a category-3 disaster (which, in case you’ve already forgotten, is a tragedy on a par with World War I)?
Because, as I said, lots of people these days have a vested interest in scaring you to death.
Tags: American History, Disaster Management, Economics, Energy, Environment, Politics, Propaganda, Terrorism, War 
I suppose the US practices a category 4 – category 7 foreign policy.
Anthony Gregory | Jun 8, 2010 | Reply
This illuminating article severely understates the “invisible” effects of government policies and regulations, which are, among other things, FAR more persistent, and pervasive than the average earthquake or oil spill.
They often kill no one outright. But they DO all the same consume human life – a piece of yours, a piece of mine, a piece of hers. And they all do this. And they all keep doing it. And they do it everywhere. All the time.
They need their own category. Somewhere around 1 would be about right.
N. Joseph Potts | Jun 8, 2010 | Reply
How nice to read a level headed assessment of the Gulf oil disaster after the endless stream of hysterical vituperation from the top to bottom of the US hierachy.
John Harrison | Jun 9, 2010 | Reply
This is an excellent idea for putting issues in perspective. It helps to have a scale for putting things in perspecive for public policy purposes.
The key difficulty here is that politicians have a way of demagoguing issues in such a way as to exploit the possibility of future destruction, beyond the rational assessment of known damage.
For example, what if Saddam gets/has WMD and unleashes them, AIDS may kill multi-millions (forecasts in mid-late 80′s), global warming, and so on. Even more so ... we know that 9/11 was terrible, but in the scheme of things the damage was not as great as a major war or some natural disasters. But is it a portent of things to come that needs to be met with tremendous force/resources so as to prevent an even more apocalyptic outcome? Many would say no, but those in the grip of fear and under the spell of government representatives, are likely to carry the day.
D. Saul Weiner | Jun 9, 2010 | Reply
If fear did not exist, and instead replaced with courage and confidence.....We would not have half the cable channels that we do, and Glenn Beck would be just another pretty face!
michael gooch | Jun 11, 2010 | Reply
This scale takes only into account lives lost. If your environment, your heritage, and your personal economy are destroyed, I would characterize that as a pretty serious catastrophe. And your notion that this catastrophe’s economic impact is proportional to the lives lost is absolutely ludicrous.
I am put off by the whole notion that this isn’t as big a deal as the federal government is making out. It’s actually funny, really, because those of us close to it seem to be the only ones who realize that the government isn’t taking it seriously enough.
Maybe having your wetlands wash away, and along with it your heritaage and your entire way of life destroyed doesn’t qualify as a huge catastrophe to you, Mr. Payne, but it does to those people who are living through it.
There are at least 50,000 barrels of oil shooting into the Gulf of Mexico every single day. There is no end in sight and oil continues to wash ashore here in Louisiana. Thousands of people are out of work. Businesses that have been in the same families for generations are ruined. People cannot feed their families. The mayor of Grand Isle, LA, who is himself a fisherman by trade, is using his own personal credit card to feed the children of his constituents who have run out of money. People are delivering their pets to the animal shelters because they cannot afford even to buy dog food. I could continue this litany, but I hope you are getting the point.
Frankly, I find this scale to be devoid of any compassion, almost as if a computer without any concept of humanity had developed it.
Why don’t you bring your drawing board down to Grand Isle, Lousiana, or anywhere else on the eastern coastline of Louisiana and start all over again.
Elizabeth Higgs | Jun 11, 2010 | Reply
@Elizabeth — Nicely stated.
No doubt, we’ll recover. But we’ll be dealing with the results of this spill for years if not decades. Not a small thing.
Walter Reade | Jun 12, 2010 | Reply
Your article is interesting, but not all fear is negative. The recent earthquake in Mexicali, MX, immediately South and East of San Diego was indeed a wake-up call to be prepared. This earthquake did kill many in Mexicali, and will have disrupted that economy for years to come.
Our Recent Earthquakes site had a very interesting chart on the home page. It demonstrates that while earthquake frequency is not increasing from past years, the SIZE of the earthquakes have increased dramatically in the recent 5 years. These are reasons to worry.
Bobby Vassallo | Jul 28, 2010 | Reply
James,
Hindsight is 20/20, they say. In reflecting on your article of June 7, 2010, we have the benefit of seeing a few disasters which would “scare you to death.” Haiti, Chile, Indonesia, New Zealand, and now Japan with thousands killed? Category 5 or 6 on your chart?
As I said previously, we must prepare here in the US. A major quake is coming; no, not if, but when.
As in Haiti and Japan, these areas are suffering from No food, No water. Stores were cleaned out in a day and people are starving and thirsty. With thousands killed in Japan, we still don’t know the final toll. And, with nuclear power plants hanging like the “Sword of Damocles,” we pray the number doesn’t explode.
Prepare. If you don’t, you put yourself at risk, as well as your family. Neighbors will be knocking on your door needing water first, then food. A bit of fear is justified. Get an earthquake preparedness kit free at http://recentearthquakes.net. Use it.
bobby vassallo | Mar 22, 2011 | Reply
Fear is one thing that charges economy. It’s a strong emotion that moves people, even more than hope or love. Let’s bet that couple months before end of the world of 2012 (not sure when, don’t care much) sales of water, food, supplies and other necessities will skyrocket.
engineering leveling guide | Mar 27, 2011 | Reply