disasters

In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall as a Category 3 storm with maximum winds of 125 mph, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The cost of the ensuing damage to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast was more than $80 billion; it is generally considered to be most destructive tropical storm in U.S. history in terms of property damage, followed by Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and Hurricane Ike in 1998.

The need to “put a face” on a humanitarian crisis and give it individual particularity is premised on a well-established phenomenon: As the numbers of a group experiencing suffering increases, the level of compassion felt for that group typically decreases. However, the mechanism behind this apparently counterintuitive dynamic — declining compassion as the level of suffering increases — has long resisted understanding.

Japan sees more local and distant tsunami events than any other country — indeed the very term “tsunami” comes from the Japanese language. The massive quake and tsunami in March 2011 that have devastated northern parts of that country are situated in a long natural and cultural history that has prompted Japan to take ever-more elaborate preventative measures.

If ever there were a natural event worth forecasting, it would be a major earthquake. Currently, there are dozens of long-term predictive models employed around the world that attempt to do just that with varying degrees of success. One such model, named EEPAS (Every Earthquake a Precursor According to Scale), attempts to predict the magnitude, location and probability of a future major quake based on indicative measures of the minor earthquakes that precede it.