Too many people in nature's way

The dead and the desperate of New Orleans now join the farmers of Aceh and the fishermen of Trincomalee, villagers in Iran and the slum dwellers of Haiti in a world being dealt ever more punishing blows by natural disasters.

It's a world where Americans can learn from even the poorest nations, experts say, and where they should learn not to build future settlements like the drowned old metropolis on the Mississippi. Terry Jeggle, a U.N. disaster-reduction planner, cites the New Orleans levee system - dependent on pumps that run on electricity produced by fuel that must be transported in. One failure will lead to another along that chain.

By one critical measure, the impact on populations, statistics show the planet to be increasingly unsafe. More than 2.5 billion people were affected by floods, earthquakes, hurricanes and other natural disasters between 1994 and 2003, a 60 percent increase over the previous two 10-year periods. By another measure - property damage - 2004 was the costliest year on record for global insurers, who paid out more than $40 billion on natural disasters.

But generally it's not that more "events" are happening, rather that more people are in the way, said Thomas Loster, a Munich Re expert. "More and more people are being hit," he said. In the 1970s, only 11 percent of earthquakes affected human settlements, researchers at Belgium's University of Louvain report. That soared to 31 percent in 1993-2003, including a quake in 2003 that killed 26,000 people in Iran, whose population has doubled since the '70s.

The expanding U.S. population "has migrated to hazard-prone areas - to Florida, the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, particularly barrier islands, to California," noted retired U.S. government seismologist Robert M. Hamilton, a disaster-prevention specialist.

The scientific consensus expects global warming to intensify storms, floods, heat waves and drought. Climatologists are still researching whether climate change has already strengthened hurricanes, whose energy is drawn from warm ocean waters, or whether the Atlantic Basin and Gulf are witnessing only a cyclical upsurge in intense storms. Computer models of climate change in the decades to come point to more devastating Category 5 storms.

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