The recent disasters in Texas, Florida and the Caribbean are almost beyond belief, but should they be called ‘natural disasters’? I’m uncertain what constitutes a valid definition of such events, but many scholars say they are not natural at all — we simply settle ourselves in the wrong locations.
I became interested in these phenomena while attending graduate school at Ohio State. My major professor and other professors in the sociology department founded the Disaster Research Center which became a central player in the examination of disasters (it later was moved to the University of Delaware). With a professor/friend from Wittenberg University (a cultural geographer) we started visiting the sites of a few disasters.
Our first interest was evoked by an earthquake in Nicaragua’s capital city of Managua. I had initiated an eight-week long study-abroad program there, and the next year my friend (at that time a professor at Wilmington College) repeated this program. The following year an earthquake hit Managua, killing thousands. Actually, it is not known how many died, but the estimate often repeated, but unverified, is 10,000.
Due to the lack of funds the government simply built a tall fence around the devastated inner city, filled the sewer system with poison and years later returned to remove the rubble. I can remember that years later as they removed the remains of buildings that bodies were still being discovered. One specific story described a family from Colombia in South America that had been missing for years.
I might say that the old center of Managua is not rebuilt and the city is essentially a series of suburbs around the mostly empty core.
Why was Managua built in this location? That is an excellent question because this was the second earthquake to hit and destroy the city in the same location. I seriously doubt that this question can be adequately answered, but since it was clearly the largest city in the country, roads and railroads met there and reportedly half of the economy was centered there. I imagine also that some powerful local people did not want to lose their investments. Very poor planning!
Our next venture into post-disaster analysis was more intense and lasted for years. It was a hurricane that hit the north coast of Honduras and again the statistics are not reliable, but there were fewer deaths than in Managua, but hundreds of thousands were affected. On this occasion, we received a grant from Church World Service (an agency of the National Council of Churches here in the U.S.) to analyze the success of the 350 houses they were building for victims.
This research continued for several years, and resulted in several articles published in international journals and presentations at international conferences (even a National Science meeting in Lima, Peru). Our findings were very clear — the residents were very pleased with their new houses (it was clear that the recipients were very poor and the quality of the new homes, though very modest, improved their standard of living). In each of the three sites in which the 350 houses are located, services such as running water, sewage, education, work opportunities, etc. became available.
This did not happen immediately, but clearly the lives of these people were significantly improved. We were not convinced from the beginning that the outcome would be so positive, but fortunately, it was.
The next disaster was an earthquake in Guatemala in 1976 where some 22,000 were killed. In this case those who died were the poorest — mostly near the capital, Guatemala City. They were migrants from rural areas where, for a variety of reasons, they were unable to survive and hoped their chances would improve in the city. They located their houses or huts (they are called champas in Central America) on hillsides which were exceedingly steep and unused.
With the coming of the earthquake, the champas crashed down the steep hillsides killing the inhabitants. We attended a meeting on the campus of Georgia Tech which focused on this event that resulted in several books documenting a wide variety of factors surrounding the quake.
The Mississippi River flood of 1973 which is considered one of the largest in this river’s recorded history was our next disaster. Flooding of such important waterways is common, and has a long history before human settlement had their impact. Like the burning of old-growth forests, however, such activity serves to positively impact future growth, periodic flooding also renews the fertility of fields and serves a positive function. However, when forests are cut and undergrowth is replaced with modern agriculture the stage is set for disaster.
Living with the vicissitudes of nature is difficult enough, but add to this the explosion in human population numbers and the growing impact of global warming and we can expect increasing numbers of Texas and Florida type disasters. (When I was born the population of the world was less than 3 billion; today it is more than 7 billion and the expectation is that several more billions will be added before the trend is reversed.)
A further disaster I visited was the earthquake that devastated Mexico City in 1985. Again, thousands were killed, but exact figures are unknown. In this case Mexico City was constructed on a lake bed. When Cortez arrived in what we now know as the Valley of Mexico in 1519, he discovered the Aztec city called Tenochtitlan which was located on islands in Lake Texcoco. Over the years the lake was slowly drained and the Spanish built the modern capital of Mexico on the mostly dry lake bed.
By pumping the water from the aquifer below the city sinks. This process has accelerated in recent years and parts of the city have sunk a full 30 feet. I finished college in Mexico City back in the 1950s and have watched tall building gradually lean in one direction or another and the quake of 1985 simply magnified this process. The last time I visited the city, Mexican engineers were actually righting these structures with remarkable success.
Undoubtedly, future quakes are in the offing and the process will be repeated — it doesn’t take a prophet to understand what has just happened in Mexico City!
One might think that hurricanes and floods are different from earthquakes, but we are learning that even quakes can be caused by human intervention. The recent efforts to extract natural gas from deep in the earth (fracking) is apparently causing earthquakes. The problem is caused by wastewater disposal used in the fracking process which is pumped deep into the earth’s crust.
According to the U.S. Geological Service report, “Fracking is NOT causing most of the induced earthquakes. Wastewater disposal is the primary cause of the recent increase in earthquakes in the central United States.”
From a “Scientific American” article comes the observation, “Scientists are increasingly confident about the link between earthquakes and oil and gas production, yet regulators are slow to react.” Another case of the human footprint on our earthly home!
Mother Nature is not too predictable and is undoubtedly becoming less predictable. With the increasing sophisticated technology to identify faults in the earth’s crust and techniques to construct buildings that can withstand serious seismic shock, we should be able to avoid some of the inevitable catastrophes of the future. (Not to mention building on high ground.)
It will take money and serious forethought, two things we are too often unable or unwilling to employ.
