Dana D. Kelley

witness to destruction that, in earlier times, we would only have read about.

It’s a tribute to our improved meteorological prognostication that a Category 4 hurricane slamming into a populated shoreline and spreading tropical storm-force winds across a 300-mile inland span only claimed 33 lives (as of this writing).

Damage in dollars is something else, of course, and estimates have already exceeded the $4.5 billion threshold. As many as 1 million people wound up being without power, officials reported.

Bad as Michael was, its lethality paled compared to the Indonesian natural disaster two weeks earlier, whose death toll stands at 2,000 and still counting. A 7.5-Richter scale earthquake produced a tsunami that sent a 20-foot wave crashing into Palu and other cities.

It’s hard to imagine the force of such a wall of water; watching it happen on cell-phone video footage, and hearing panicked cries of fear, made me shudder at the inadequacy of imagination.

Perhaps you have never heard of “liquefaction.” It’s one of those ominous yet scientific-sounding words that one might expect to find lurking in a lesser known sci-fi story. Tragically, it is no fiction, and its truth and experience are more horrifying than alien invasion flicks.

Liquefaction is a geological process by which the soil structure collapses. It’s a seismic condition in which terra firma essentially becomes liquid, resulting in a quicksand-like “land tsunami” (as Indonesian witnesses described it) that swallows up entire homes, blocks, neighborhoods.

A Sept. 28 time-lapse satellite photo of Palu showcases the devastation in motion. It begins by showing

These events epitomize a justreleased United Nations report on economic losses suffered in natural disasters from 19982017: The most deadly events are earthquakes, the most destructive economically are storms, and those affecting the most people are floods.

All told, the summary numbers of Mother Nature’s havoc the past 20 years are staggering.

A total of 7,255 disasters were catalogued in nine different classifications that killed 1.3 million people: floods, storms, earthquakes, extreme temperatures, landslides, droughts, wildfires, volcanic activities and dry land mass movement.

More than 4.4 billion people were directly affected: injured, homeless, displaced or in need of emergency assistance. The total economic loss was calculated to be $2.9 trillion, of which the U.S. share was $945 billion (due to our high assets value).

In times of disasters, nature awes and intimidates us, but at the same time inspires and lifts us.

We always can hope that our enhanced ability for tragedy awareness and empathy might percolate up as one of those majority things that do indeed unite, rather than divide, us.