Catastrophes natural and man-made

The last couple of days have been pretty bad globally, which means busy for me. In the natural hazard category the earthquakes in Afghanistan have to take the lead, with at least hundreds killed and thousands injured out of the 1.7 million people within the significant ground motion zone, including the city of Herat …

The construction of most of the buildings in this part of the world are not earthquake resilient, in rural areas often mud-brick/adobe type construction, and disintegrate when an earthquake hits. The new reports refer to a single earthquake, but the USGS data shows two 6.0+ events about 30 minutes apart, with many aftershocks in the 5+ range. Truly devastating, and unfortunately geopolitics enters in given the various sanctions and attitude that helping people in Afghanistan indirectly helps the Taliban government, thus aid will be slower and more limited than it should be.

In the hurricane/typhoon realm, the West Pacific has two typhoons near land. Typhoon Koinu is taking a jog towards Hong Kong this morning US time, and has been disrupting the region for several days now after causing significant damage to Taiwan. Further east, Tropical Storm Bolaven looks to strengthen into a typhoon as it passes just north of Guam, and is expected to cause damage across the Mariana Islands this week:

In the Atlantic the remnants of Philippe are bringing stormy weather to Canada today (link to CBC), here’s the TAOS/WX swath of rain and wind …

There is an invest area coming off the coast of Africa. It looks to stay in the eastern Atlantic and be of concern to those with pelagic interests, but this year who knows. It will be probably the middle of next week before there is anything much to say about it …

Not to be outdone by nature, humans are also busy killing themselves off. The situation in Israel and the multi-party, multi-state conflicts in that region are probably an order of magnitude more complex than the Ukraine-Russia conflict (which is insanely complicated), so if you think the media coverage of that is bad, coverage of Near East Asia is even worse. Sadly a lot of the internal policy debates are not much better informed. I know people on several of the “sides”, spent time living in Israel, am broken-hearted at what has happened in Lebanon, and hope that the bloodshed will not be too extreme, even though I fear the worst is yet to come. Given the simplistic, comic-book depictions of both conflicts and the hyper-charged environment I think I’ll not comment in public and as with Ukraine stick to trying to inject some measure of sanity in private. If there were any situation where prayer is needed, it’s probably this one.