January 2, 2012

"We don't know how many people are buried under that mud."

Typhoon Washi.

5 comments:

Toad Trend said...

A most unfortunate choice of a name for a typhoon.

Craig said...

My housekeeper said ten houses burned down on New Year's Eve just in her barangay.

rhhardin said...

Capitalism saves lives.

Owing to specialization and trade that thrives there, wealth increases to easily cover the cost of disaster-resisting structures.

If you're in a corrupt society or a command economy, you get washed away and buried and starved.

Aid is misguided if it supports the culture against something that would improve it.

How to improve it is the problem. Free trade would help a lot all the time.

edutcher said...

As rh notes, the tendency to live close to the ocean in simple huts or houses thrown together from whatever materials are closest at hand, often produces mass fatalities in storms of a violence rarely seen in these climes.

madAsHell said...

Here in the Pacific Northwest, people have bought homes on floodplains, and then they expect the Army Corp (...or Corpse) of Engineers to protect their investment.