A Poor Disaster in a Rich Country

With at least 75 people dead and extensive damage throughout the city of Christchurch, the toll of the recent New Zealand earthquake is already a heavy one. A number of factors contributed to make this earthquake so deadly-- the magnitude, the closeness of the epicenter to Christchurch, the shallowness of the epicenter, the time of day, and the fact that much damage from the September 2010 Christchurch earthquake had yet to be repaired.  The death toll and damage caused by the recent earthquake in first world New Zealand is nothing like what occurs when large earthquakes hit third world countries, such as Haiti in January 2010, but for a first world country the destruction is fairly high. 

I hope that New Zealand recovers quickly and that the earth-shaking quiets down long enough for proper rebuilding. A geologist colleague of my fiance is currently in New Zealand, just outside of Christchurch, and he told us, "the place is like a warzone." He's not sure when he'll back able to make it home (to South Africa), but he says he just feels lucky to be alive.

Thinking about the toll of the recent New Zealand earthquake, I was reminded of a post about "rich and poor disasters" that I wrote a few years back for Skepchick. Before I started a geology blog, I used to sporadically blog about geology over at Skepchick. These days, I blog here at Georneys about geology, and I blog over at Skepchick about other skeptical and scientific things, such as why skeptics should be interested in statistics. Occasionally, I will re-post some of my old geology posts from Skepchick. I will also sometimes cross-post on both blogs. The post below originally appeared on Skepchick in 2007 here. New Orleans still hasn't fully recovered from Hurricane Katrina.

I don't want to distract from the all the devastation that recently occurred in New Zealand, but I think Hurricane Katrina is a good example to ponder when considering what factors-- both geologic and socioeconomic--affect the toll of natural disasters and the eventual recovery-- or lack thereof-- of a region from a natural disaster.

A boy bikes past homes unrepaired since Hurricane Katrina, on the eve of the storm's five year anniversary in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Image from Reuters: Lee Celano.

A few weeks ago [note: in 2007] I listened to a talk by John Mutter, a geologist at Columbia University. Mutter has two roles at Columbia. First, he is a geophysist in the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory doing traditional research in marine geology and seismology. Second, he is a faculty member in Columbia’s Earth Institute doing research on the links between Earth Science and Social Science.