The Disaster Profiteers: How Natural Disasters Make the Rich Richer and the Poor Even Poorer (5 page)

Disaster deaths are always highly political. The government of Myanmar rarely reports disaster deaths, and the government of North Korea almost never does. No international agency is charged with finding out just exactly how many die, because such a task would be an infringement on sovereignty, so we have to rely on country reports. CRED does the best job of figuring out what deaths have occurred, but it acknowledges significant uncertainties. In Myanmar, international media attention forced the government to acknowledge that they had a disaster on their hands days after Cyclone Nargis made landfall in 2008, but no one seriously believes that country leaders accurately reported the deaths, and it is widely believed that the numbers were much higher than official government figures. Large fatality figures would seem to suggest that the government is not in control, and complete control is one of the central missions of authoritarian governments like the junta in Myanmar; so too for North Korea.

Queasiness about reporting embarrassingly large death figures is not the sole province of authoritarian, xenophobic governments. Eric Klinenberg wrote a classic study of the 1995 heat wave in Chicago, during which Mayor Richard M. Daley challenged figures from the county's chief medical examiner that had been widely reported in the media. Daley said, “It's hot. . . . But let's not blow it out of proportion. . . . Every day people die of natural causes. You cannot claim that everybody who has died in the last eight or nine days died of heat. Then everybody in the summer that dies will die of heat.”
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The mayor was suggesting that the number was lower than the 521 that the medical examiner had determined. The final figure was calculated to be 739.

There's nothing new in this. In his excellent book about the High Plains blizzard of 1888,
The Children's Blizzard,
David Laskin writes
of the debate about the death toll from that tragic event: “In the national press an unseemly brawl had broken out over the number of blizzard deaths.” A federal judge had asserted that “Dakota papers were deliberately underestimating and ‘covering up' the truth about loss of life.”
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The judge claimed the figure might be 1,000, while newspapers reported 300. The judge thought there was a cover-up to prevent the Dakota Territory from getting a bad name, which might dissuade people from moving there. At the time, the blizzard was consistently treated as a freak of Nature, one that was never going to return. Now we know better.

The death toll from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire is still debated. William Bronson, in
The Earth Shook, the Sky Burned,
tells us that the initial death toll was reported to be 375 because no count was made in Chinatown: residents there were not citizens and didn't belong in the official count.
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Major General Adolphus Greely, who commanded US relief operations in the city, put the number at 664 and included the Chinese victims. I have not been able to access this report, but I suspect it is a straightforward count of actual bodies recovered, in the style of Meigs. A 1972 study by NOAA put the figure at 700 to 800,
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but the highest figure of all, about 3,000, comes from Gladys Hansen and Emmel Condon's provocatively titled 1989 book,
Denial of Disaster: The Untold Story and Photographs of the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906.
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Hansen, a retired librarian, has made it her life's work to search out documents and account for all those who died in the earthquake and fire, and she might well have the most accurate number.

In addition to governments
reducing disaster death counts for political reasons, it is also widely believed, though difficult to document, that they may exaggerate deaths too. Countries hoping for contributions might exaggerate deaths because history shows that
donors are more motivated by deaths than by damage, even though contributions are used to tend to the living and to repair damage. High mortality implies a huge number of survivors in great need. The Haitian government is thought to have greatly exaggerated the death toll from the 2010 earthquake, but most NGOs did not question those numbers.

For example, about ten years ago, I was in Taiwan with a group from Columbia University to discuss how climate forecasts could be used to mitigate damage done by extreme weather. Taiwan experiences many typhoon strikes, and they typically bring biblical rainfall. The intense rain causes landslides and flash floods that sweep away whole villages and take the lives of countless people living on denuded steep slopes near the cities where they work, similar to the barrios around Rio and other Latin American cities. As recently as 2009, Typhoon Morakot took more than 500 lives in Taiwan.

The representatives of the Taiwanese meteorological service viewed these high figures with vexation and a distinct sense of embarrassment. On one hand, they were very proud of the rapid economic progress their country had made, but as one government scientist told me, when Taiwan experiences a typhoon, the high death toll “makes us look like we are still a third-world country.” They wanted accurate forecast information so they could evacuate people from dangerous areas like the informal housing on the steep slopes of denuded hillsides. I believe they reported death tolls accurately, but they didn't want disasters to make their forward-looking country seem backward.

Deaths are hard to estimate for a number of completely apolitical reasons as well. Just who gets included in the victim list? Many children and adults who died from the effects of the Children's Blizzard of 1888 actually survived the awful night of exposure; they died many days or even weeks later of complications from that exposure or
from misguided treatment by doctors and others trying to nurse them back to health. Like the wounded in wars of the past, many of whom survived a battle but died days later from infections in their wounds, people often survive a disaster only to die days or weeks later. When should we stop including a death as disaster related?

Sometimes we see the terms
direct
and
indirect
used to qualify deaths. Direct deaths are fairly obvious: they require that the individual died unequivocally from causes like drowning in a flood or being crushed in collapsed building. But people often die in other circumstances, such as from falling while clearing tree branches from their roofs after a hurricane. People died during Superstorm Sandy and in the days after because they operated gasoline-powered backup generators indoors and were asphyxiated by poisoned air despite usually very clear signage on those generators against such use.

Many people, especially the elderly, have pre-existing heart or respiratory conditions, and they die from the traumatic exacerbation of those maladies. Should they be counted in the disaster death toll? Are they direct or indirect deaths? Perhaps they would have died anyway, maybe only a few days or weeks later. The disarming medical term for this is
harvesting
; the disaster just chopped them down a short while before they would have fallen on their own. Do you count someone who died in a car accident while trying to escape an oncoming tornado? Or someone who fell from a roof while trying to secure windows as a hurricane approached?

The bottom line is this: There are no uniform international standards in mortality reporting for natural disasters. No one really knows how many people die in natural disasters who would not have died otherwise. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a set of strict criteria that it uses for all disasters and disease outbreaks, but the criteria are very conservative and typically give minimum estimates.

It might make more sense to estimate injuries rather than deaths. After all, the injured are the ones who need attention. In road accidents and train crashes, many people suffer injuries but relatively few die. In almost all disasters, the number of people injured considerably exceeds the number who die.

It's not hard to understand why. In earthquakes, with furniture falling and glass shattering, it is easy to be struck by a crumbling wall or ceiling. Often people are pinned under fallen structures. In Haiti, many of the injuries caused that way required amputations. (By
injuries
we mean those treated for injuries by aid agencies that keep records, such as the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders.) Only 63 people died in the Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco in 1989, but the number of injured recorded was almost 4,000, a ratio of about 60 to 1. Presumably everyone who suffered even minor injuries was treated.

Tropical cyclones have injury-to-fatality ratios similar to earthquakes, but floods don't injure people in the same numbers: You either drown or you don't. People are beaten around by floodwaters, they survive and require treatment for injuries, but in nothing like the numbers or the severity of injuries seen in earthquakes, for instance. Famines can cause hundreds of thousands to suffer, and vast numbers of people have perished in famines. Like floods, droughts don't really injure people per se, but they can result in huge numbers of people needing medical attention for malnourishment. People weakened by hunger become susceptible to a wide variety of diseases. Many famine deaths are not the result of starvation but of disease.

There is always an issue after disaster events with people who go missing and are unaccounted for. Even in very wealthy countries with very good census surveys, it can be hard to determine the exact number of people who go missing. Making such determinations in poorer
countries where governments hardly know how many people live in any given region at any time can be almost impossible. Conducting a census is expensive. The last census in the United States cost taxpayers $13 billion, or about $42 per person counted.

Some of those who go missing after disasters are surely dead and their bodies are never found. People get washed out to sea by storm surges in cyclones and tsunamis. In some cultures, the dead are buried very quickly, usually due to the unwarranted fear of disease transmission. The corpses of people who die of transmittable diseases, such as Ebola, are sources of contagion, but the corpses of people who die disease free are not. The fear that arises in some cultures is based on the sad fact that, in many parts of the world, so many people die of untreated diseases. After the earthquake in Haiti, thousands were buried in mass graves; most were not identified.

Typically, searches for survivors and victims' remains end after several days. Just how long searches continue is based on some guess that anyone not found by a certain time must surely be dead. Cadaver dogs may then be used to systematically scan disaster scenes for bodies. In earthquakes, searches are terminated after a week or so, based on the assumption that anyone still buried in the rubble will have died. It is a gruesome thought, but the fact that some people are pulled from the rubble more than a week after an earthquake implies that others must take many days to die, from starvation or dehydration, in the ruins of the homes, schools, and stores that once seemed safe.

Anyone still unaccounted for in the collapse of the Rana Plaza garment sweatshop in Bangladesh was almost certainly dead. Those unaccounted for after a major tsunami are almost certainly dead also. For weeks after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, many people remained unaccounted for. Stories of traumatized survivors who wandered around for days before they were found
gave false hope to those with missing family members or friends. The death toll in the 9/11 attacks is probably the most accurately estimated of all disasters in which more than a few died. Huge efforts were made to account for everyone. The total figure is 2,726, including those in the airplanes and 13 people who died after September 11.
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The
Times-Picayune
in New Orleans published the names of Katrina victims, a practice that has a long history worldwide. Survivors who have family members or someone they know unaccounted for search these lists with a conflicted mixture of hope and trepidation—hoping not to see their loved ones' names but wanting to know their fate. And after some time, most people come to accept that missing loved ones must indeed be dead and just hope that their remains will be found and given a proper burial. Having someone go missing, never to be heard from again, is simply dreadful.

Many people missing after natural disasters are thought to have left the area as the cyclone or floodwaters approached or because their crops failed in a drought and there was no food. Some are forced to leave because an earthquake destroyed their homes and workplaces. If they are displaced to refugee camps, like the tent cities that housed earthquake survivors in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, they can be counted fairly accurately and their names recorded.

But a lot of people, especially in poorer places, move away and don't return. They stay with relatives, find jobs in other places, and send their children to other schools, and they don't always report in. In Haiti, it would have been hard for displaced people to know to whom to report. And to what purpose? In rich countries, people report in and have every reason to expect their government to help; they are vocal in their criticism if they feel they are not being adequately assisted.

Droughts displace many more people for greater distances and for longer periods of time than do most other disasters. Often after a drought there is nothing to go back to but parched land. There may be nowhere nearby to shelter from a drought, which may affect a vast area, typically much larger than a flood. If adequately warned, you can get out of the way of a flood, then wait until the water subsides and return home. Often you don't have to go too far or stay away for long, and in farming areas, people want to get back quickly and replant if possible to ensure a crop to replace the one lost. Droughts operate over much longer periods and over greater areas than floods.