Sunday, November 10, 2013

Corpses hung from Tree branches?

 Corpses hung from tree branches and were scattered along sidewalks and among flattened buildings. People raided grocery stores and gas stations in search of food, fuel and water.

end partial quote from:

Horror stories as 10000 feared dead in Typhoon Haiyan

The reality of this is pretty horrifying. What this means is people were thrown through the air and storm surges of the waters from the storm and impaled on broken tree branches.

This storm is turning out to be possibly the most horrific one ever on earth.

The only thing worse I have heard of is the Earthquake and tsunami in Japan in 2011 that killed around 30,000 people and the 2004 Earthquake and Tsunami in Indonesia and throughout the Indian Ocean that killed 250,000 people.

But, for a non-earthquake related weather event, this has to be the worst loss of life in over 100 years I believe if 10,000 or more is the correct number of fatalities from a weather event.

Begin quote from pdf file

3
Death and Death Rates Due to Extreme
Weather Events
Global and U.S. Trends, 1900–2006
Executive summary
Despite the recent spate of deadly extreme weather
events – such as the 2003 European heat wave and the
2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons in the USA – aggregate
mortality and mortality rates due to extreme weather
events are generally lower today than they used to be.
Globally, mortality and mortality rates have declined by
95 percent or more since the 1920s. The largest
improvements came from declines in mortality due to
droughts and floods, which apparently were responsible
for 93 percent of all deaths caused by extreme events
during the 20th Century. For windstorms, which, at 6
percent, contributed most of the remaining fatalities,
mortality rates are also lower today but there are no
clear trends for mortality. Cumulatively, the declines
more than compensated for increases due to the 2003
heat wave.
With regard to the U.S., current mortality and mortality
rates due to extreme temperatures, tornados, lightning,
floods and hurricanes are also below their peak levels of
a few decades ago. The declines in annual mortality for
the last four categories range from 62 to 81 percent,
while mortality rates declined 75 to 95 percent.
If extreme weather has indeed become more extreme for
whatever reason, global and U.S. declines in mortality
and mortality rates are perhaps due to increases in
societies’ collective adaptive capacities. This enhanced
adaptive capacity is associated with a variety of
interrelated factors – greater wealth, increases in
technological options, and greater access to and
availability of human and social capital – although luck
may have played a role. Because of these developments,
nowadays extreme weather events contribute less than
0.06 percent to the global and U.S. mortality burdens in
an average year, and seem to be declining in general.
Equally important, mortality due to extreme weather
events has declined despite an increase in all-cause
mortality, suggesting that humanity is adapting better to
extreme events than to other causes of mortality. In
summary, there is no signal in the mortality data to
indicate increases in the overall frequencies or severities
of extreme weather events, despite large increases in the
population at risk.
 
end quote from:
http://www.csccc.info/reports/report_23.pdf

 

 

 

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