Lessons from Recent Disasters

The world is appalled and horrified at the devastation, our hearts go out to the victims, we donate to various humanitarian efforts, and then the questions begin. 

How can mankind do a better job of mitigating our risks to these kinds of events?  How serious can the natural phenomena be?  Why were facilities built without adequate protection, against the most serious risks?  Where else in the world are there similar vulnerabilities?  How can we improve state-of-art of response to disaster?

In my attached notes on Lessons which need to be Learned, and implemented, I share these questions, and the answers I have found so far.

The most severe earthquake in recent years was 9.5 in Chile.  The worst possible is in excess of 10.0 but extremely rare.  So a nation in an earthquake prone area decides to only protect against 8 point something.  Perhaps it is not economically feasible to protect against the more severe quakes.  How many hundreds of years do nuclear waste spent rods have to be stored?  Is it economically feasible to protect them from higher intensity quakes?

It would appear that the severity of earthquakes and weather storms are NOT increasing, although climate change’s rising sea levels will adversely impact many coastal areas.  What is happening is a rise in human population, without commensurate rise in protection against the predictable natural phenomena.  Human mitigation is going BACKWARDS, so disasters are getting worse thanks to actions or inactions by mankind

After the crisis has begun with Japan, Haiti, Italy, Katrina, other nations’ situations, we find out that the disaster was predicted.  Some science authority or other had predicted with great precision where the harm would strike, the scale of the damage, and the political authorities apparently did nothing about it.   This generates questions why not?

Have governments grown too complex to react effectively to challenges which can be communicated in simple terms?  Do the people need better tools to measure the effectiveness of their governments, particularly the oversight function?

Many nations have a revolving door of industry leaders and government regulators, with heavy industry lobbying for governments to ease up on oversight, which leads to finger pointing when some crisis indicates that government oversight should have been stronger.  This is especially intense in the USA with the economic melt down, and mining accidents.  The economic melt down has been devastating for the entire world.  It is particularly annoying that many state investigations saw it coming, but were prevented from protecting their citizens by the US Supreme Court, thanks to a turf war with federal regulators who seemed to be overly influenced by Wall Street.  I explore this in great detail in my research notes “Economic Disasters – Past Present and Future.”

As I studied causes of the Financial Crisis, I found that there were many red flags of probable doom ahead, which turned out to be accurate.  This raises the question “What red flags now exist, to warn of future disasters which have not yet happened?”

While my notes on the Economic Diasters are primarily about USA events, Japan is also at risk.

Our world civilization is dependent upon industrial commodities which the world is running out of.