Natural Disasters

A natural disaster is defined as a natural event such as a flood, earthquake, or hurricane that causes great damage or loss of life. This essay will aim at the natural disasters caused because of seismic activities namely, earthquakes and tsunamis. A human disaster has elements of human intent, negligence or error. Therefore for a natural disaster to become a human one it most suffer from these such factors. Some examples of the Earthquakes and tsunamis that this essay will examine are the Japan Tsunami of 2011 and the Boxing Day earthquake 2004, the Kobe Earthquake and the Earthquake in Haiti. Seismicity is the occurrence or frequency of earthquakes in a region. This essay will argue that in fact those most natural disasters are either made worse by human causes or could be made less severe by human actions. The risk to people can be evaluated by looking at the hazard, the vulnerability and the capacity to cope; these factors will be taken into account when deciding to what extent disasters are human or natural.

One area of concern when discussing whether or not disasters are human or natural is the hazard itself, this is closely linked to capacity to cope and both will be examined together. Two examples of Earthquakes that illustrate how differences between capacities cope make a bigger difference than the hazard. The Earthquakes are the Kobe earthquake and the Haiti earthquake. These two earthquakes measured 7.3 and 7 respectively on the Richter scale. The effects were significantly different. Japan is considered the most prepared city for Earthquakes in the world as it lies on a destructive plate margin; they have a history of earthquakes and thus have grown with ever increasing budget to allocate towards seismic defences. Haiti however is one of the poorest countries and doesn’t receive as frequent earthquakes so they didn’t have anywhere the protection. Also the Japanese government implemented building regulations to help earthquakes to have a less drastic impact when they did hit, however in Haiti they couldn’t afford to build houses that could withstand small tremors thus the Haitian government felt regulations would be ignored anyway. This means that the Japanese were much more prepared for their earthquake then the Haitians. On Tuesday 17th of January 1995, a 7.3 magnitude earthquake hit Kobe; this caused 6434 casualties and left around 300,000 people homeless. Comparatively on Tuesday 12th of January 2010 a 7 magnitude earthquake hit Haiti this caused 100,000 to 316,000 casualties. This shows a significant differential in the fact that the earthquake that hit japan was stronger but actually caused sizeably less deaths thus causing the Haitian earthquake to be more of a human disaster than the Japanese one, as there was more human error than in Haiti meeting the definition of a human disaster to a greater extent. It is clear there was no human intent in either of these disasters and neither was there any negligence but the

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