Natural disasters and the methods to cope with them
► In 1349 the Avignon papacy gathered all the weapons of the Church to fight the plague. Because the plague was thought to be a calamity sent by God to punish sinners, relics, portraits of the Saints, specula, Bibles all were summoned. A crowd of 50.000 prayed together. And most of them died because the disease was contagious.
► Centuries have passed. In some parts of the globe time passes and nothing happens. Amartya Kumar Sen, Nobel laureate in 1998, has recently summarized his research on famines. Amidst unprecedented prosperity, there is still hunger. Isn’t this an anomaly?
► According to Sen, entitlements are the solution. You don’t have to be a socialist to admit that not to die from hunger is a natural right. Governments must be obligated to provide public employment programs so in poor regions famine can be prevented. Not to die because a predictable earthquake happened is also a natural right.
► Even so, Sen doesn’t say that it should be the doing of governments alone. Relief programmes ought to be coordinated programmes so well-functioning markets and open and democratic public actions coincide.
► Earthquakes are no more unexplored natural events. Except the exact timing, they can even be predicted. Through cost estimation models, it is also possible to make an educated guess about the economic costs of an earthquake under different stress scenarios.
► Recent earthquake studies can estimate the human cost and the direct and indirect economic costs. After a certain momentum threshold, like MW 7.5, weak buildings may collapse. This is the gist of the matter because total collapse is much more risky than mere damage.
► The percentage of occupants who survive in the collapsed buildings isn’t very high. In China, there have been quakes that immediately killed 40% of occupants while some 25% died during the following days because relief came late.
► Even those that don’t care about human lives but can calculate economic costs might understand why doing nothing is perilous. Diverting natural disaster funds to other means is a dangerous choice.