atul's pink diary: November 2009

NATURAL DISASTER

What is natural disaster?

Natural disaster is the effect of a natural hazard (e.g. flood, volcanic eruption, earthquake, or landslide) that affects the environment, and leads to financial, environment and/ or human losses. The resulting loss depends on the capacity of the population to support or resist the disaster, and their resilience. This understanding is concentrated in the formulation: “disasters occur when hazards meet vulnerability”. A natural hazard will hence never result in a natural disaster in areas without vulnerability, e.g. strong earthquakes in uninhabited areas. The term natural has consequently been disputed because the events are not hazards or disasters without human involvement.

Example of natural disaster: Earthquakes.

Earthquake is a sudden shake of the Earth’s crust. The vibrations may vary in magnitude. The earthquake has point of origin underground called the “focus”. The point is directly above the focus on the surface is called the “epicenter”. Earthquakes by themselves rarely kill people or wildlife. It is usually the secondary events that they trigger, such as building collapse, fires, tsunamis (seismic sea waves) and volcanoes that are actually the human disaster. As many of these could be avoided by better construction, safety systems, early warning and evacuation planning, the term unnatural disaster is not unwarranted.

Earthquakes are caused by the discharge of accumulated along geologic faults.

Above is the table of the largest and deathliest earthquakes by year 1990-2005.

Earthquake in Indonesia (as my example).

It’s been recorded that the recent earthquake in Indonesia (Southern coast of Sumatra) that happened in 30^th September 2009 registering a moment magnitude of 7.6. The major shock hit at17:16:10 local time. The epicenter was 45 kilometers (28mi) west-northwest of Padang, Sumatra and 220kilometers (140mi) southwest of Pekanbaru, Sumatra.

Due to this earthquake, the total casualties are recorded 1115 people, 1214 severely injured and 1688 slightly injured. The most deaths occurred in the areas of Padang Pariaman (313), Agam (80) and Pariaman (37).

In addition, around 135 000 houses were severely damaged, 65 000 houses were moderately damaged and 79 000 houses were slightly damaged. An estimated 250 000 families (1250 000 people) have been affected by the earthquake through the total or partial loss of their homes and livelihoods.

Below is the table of countries that have sent or pledged aid for Indonesia.