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October 09, 2005
From Katrina to Kashmir: Lost Lessons from the Medians and the Lydians
The terrible quake in Kashmir appears to have killed tens of thousands of people. Such calamities are in one sense natural: the Indian tectonic plate is pushing north right at the Himalayas.
However, just like Katrina, this too will disporportionately kill the poor, who live in substandard housing with lesser materials, and it will kill proportionately more people compared to a rich country because building codes and materials are worse in general.
In other words, a 7.6 quake in San Francisco or Tokyo would claim far, far fewer victims and that's another price people pay for living in the third world, or being dirt-poor and black in New Orleans. (The 1989 quake San Francisco killed 62 people, most of them in a single spot where an overpass collapsed. Of course, that quake was much less powerful, measuring 7.1 in the Richter scale, which is logarithmic and not linear -- I believe that's about 31 percent the power of this one. Still, the number of victims is always strikingly disporportionate between the rich and the poor).
Here's another question. There were muliple reports that Al Qaeda sympathizers around the world had called Katrina a sign of "wrath of God" on the United States. So, what does that make a quake in the muslim-controlled Kashmir, right at the beginning of Ramadan at that? (While we in the United States are not much aware of this, the status of Kashmir is a big issue in the Muslim world, especially among the would-be-jihadis and their sympathizers. It probalby ranks right after Iraq and Palestine.)
Maybe, just maybe, this devastation will spur a movement towards peace. Unfortunately, it's also possible that now the Hindu-fundamentalists will call this a wrath of God on the muslims and feel empowered until, oh, a typhoon, tsunami or an earthqake hits some part of India. And the jihadis just might conclude this earthquake is a sign they are not fighting hard enough.
One wonders what it would take: a hurricane, interrupted by an earthquake followed by a Tsunami with intermittent fires and/or hail? Wouldn't a nice, long eclipse do, as it did for the Medians and the Lydians?
Posted by zeynep at October 9, 2005 08:56 AM
Comments
From what I remember traditional Turkish village dwellings (with flexible X shaped logs holding up the load of the walls) fared much better than modern concrete block based buildings in the last major earthquake. While failure of large structures in the cities is a building code enforcement failure (corruption takes care of that one), but for village/town dwellings, sticking to tried and tested methods might have avoided the caving in of entire streets. As for drawing religious inferences from natural phenomena, they are basically Rorschach tests.
Posted by: sk at October 10, 2005 12:13 AM
Of course "the jihadis just might conclude this earthquake is a sign they are not fighting hard enough", as I'm also sure Pat Robertson or somebody can tell us the quake is a demonstration of God's displeasure with heathen terrorists.
Acts of God are open to interpretation, but more directly, what conclusion do people reach when their country has been ravaged by bombs and warfare, the acts of their enemies? In theory they are supposed to conclude that they are beaten and should give up. In practice, attacks always engender further anger and resistance.
We have seen wars end in exhaustion, and even stalemate. There does seem to be a tendency, finally, to give up when the costs are too high, whereas people are more ready to go to war when they are feeling strong and powerful.
Thus war ultimately does achieve its end of transmuting aggressiveness into death and destruction, dissipating the will to fight, but always at a cost greater than expected.
Posted by: mark at October 12, 2005 03:06 PM
I agree. To hear a young school girl speak of her classmates running amok when disaster struck...how much does it cost to teach kids about emergency exit protocols? The truth is you are right on this one. Disaster can strike anyone not just the evildoers and this is a case in point. It also illustrates Quality of Life issues as they relate to democratic countries, Pakistan not being one of them.
Posted by: Meg Porter at October 18, 2005 11:37 PM