A Disaster A Day

It certainly feels like it:

One of the worst earthquakes to hit China in three decades killed nearly 9,000 people Monday, trapped about 900 students under the rubble of their school and caused a toxic chemical leak, state media reported.

The 7.9-magnitude earthquake devastated a hilly region of small cities and towns in central China. The official Xinhua News Agency said 8,533 people died in Sichuan province and more than 200 others were killed in three other provinces and the mega-city of Chongqing.

Xinhua said 80 percent of the buildings had collapsed in Sichuan province's Beichuan county after the quake, raising fears that the overall death toll could increase sharply.

We're starting to see the impact of natural disasters on areas which have no infrastructure to manage natural disasters. The cyclone in Burma is causing a public health catastrophe. But Burma public health system was already in crisis, being one of the worst countries on Earth for water-borne diseases. Simliarly, China is experiencing a mass loss of life in this earthquake because massive development and substandard oversight has resulted in a bunch of buildings that weren't retrofitted for earthquakes in any way. There simply isn't enough money in the world for every nation on the planet to be fully prepared for a spate of disasters. And while this earthquake has little to do with global warming, the increased storm activity we've seen all over the world (including here at home) does have a link to an increasingly erratic climate, and so we're likely to see more mass-casualty events because the storms are hitting in unusual places or places where there's no way to cope with them.