Geography 2152F/G Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Ozone Depletion, Cost Overrun, Transform Fault
22 Oct 2018
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Document Summary
Documenting disasters: maintaining databases on disaster events can be difficult, why, disasters can co-occur (hurricanes cause floods, earthquakes cause landslides, etc. , morality can be difficult to count (famine, epidemics, a general lack of census taking. Disasters and statistics: statistical data is reported in absolute terms (number of casualties, billions of dollars in damage, etc. , the impact of losses is felt differently from one place to the next. 10 fishers lost in a remote village of 200 people versus 10 factory workers in a city of 200,000: therefore, statistics must be placed in a community/regional context. Media and disasters: the media tends to concentrate on, human interest, visual impact, events prioritized according to a north american perspective. Impacts vary greatly by disaster type: earthquakes tend to cause more deaths than tornadoes, floods affect more people (homelessness) than most disasters but cause fewer deaths. Impacts have not increased in equal proportions: economic losses have increased at a faster rate than deaths.
