I’m working on a story on the world’s weathermen right now and I have a lot more respect for the wacky weatherman.
Growing up on the Gulf Coast, hurricane warnings used to be good excuses for hurricane parties -beer used to run out well before bottled water at the grocery store. We’d watch the stand-ups on the Weather Channel and crack open a nice can of sarcasm. That changed for me after covering the Asian Tsunami. And it changed for my friends after the bullseye hurricane season in Florida and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.
And watching Burma makes me really appreciate the Weather Channel. The numbers being reported are staggering. As the country opens up to humanitarian aid, I’m sure the numbers will continue to change.
Still, I still don’t get it. 20,000? Category 3 and Category 4 storms batter Latin America all the time and never result in casualty rates like this. Hurricane Mitch claimed half as many lives when it battered Honduras and it was a record-breaking Category 5 storm.
Can the difference in casualties really be an open society and access to information? Or does the geography of the Irrawaddy Delta and the poverty of the region make the difference? Asia has a higher density of the world’s poor –natural disasters tend to be more deadly? Still so many casualties from a single hurricane boggles the mind. Still so many questions. If anyone has any answers- by all means drop me a line.
We’ll continue to follow the story at The World.
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Following up on the Burma college front. Last fall I interviewed some Harvard students in the Burma Action Movement. It was a story about how different generations of Burmese activists were uniting on American campuses to protest against Burma ’s military government. But the different generations define their activism differently.
Burma’s pro-democracy movement comes of age - November 2, 2007. PRI’s The World.
Well the Harvard Burma Action Movement students are raising funds for Burma, selling T-shirts according to today’s Boston Globe. Now getting that aid to those who really need it when the government won’t let you in..….
“Can the difference in casualties really be an open society and access to information?”
Excellent question. It’s not a discipline I’m expert in, but from folks I’ve met over the years it seems that having good infrastructure makes a big difference. Poor roads and bridges get washed away before anyone has a chance to use them.
Regular severe events result in society organising means of dealing with them. Societies that are good at handling emergencies (resilient), even if of a different kind, (e.g. drought vs flood) will tend to have the right institutions in place to deal with the unexpected.