Measuring Disasters

As any reader of the World Almanac knows, disasters are usually ranked solely according to the number of lives lost. Writing in The Professional Geographer, Geography Professor Harold D. Foster at British Columbia's University of Victoria suggests that this kind of ranking is simplistic because it fails to take into account the psychological stress and environmental damage that survivors must cope with.

Foster has produced a disaster magnitude scale that factors in social disruption, physical damage and injuries, as well as deaths. By his criteria, China's earthquake last August rates a 9.0 score, making it the sixth worst disaster he has plotted. Under the Foster Formula, which does not distinguish between disasters wrought by man and those wrought by nature, the top five are World War II (11.1), the Black Death (10.9), World War I (10.5), Stalin's Great Purge of 1936-38 (10.2) and the 1923 earthquake that devastated Tokyo (9.1). Some rankings will come as a surprise. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima (8.2) turns out to be only one-tenth of a point more disastrous than the 1970 avalanche in Peru.

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