2008 the deadliest year for tornadoes in U.S. since 1998, and it’s not even Memorial Day yet.
Since the Myanmar (Burma) hurricane, with already 100,000 people reported dead and 200,000 more missing, China was hit by a massive 7.9 earthquake with nearly 9,000 people dead and thousands missing or injured along with devastating tornadoes that ran through the middle of the U.S. all the way to Georgia leaving 23 dead, and there were very few reports about a tidal wave that hit S. Korea May 4th, but it killed at least seven people when it hit a pier and seaside rocks sweeping away tourists and anglers. Who knows how many were in the area.
So it’s been one heck of a week for big disasters. The tornadoes that keep hitting the center of our nation worse and worse every year are taking more and more lives. It wasn’t long ago that we could honestly make the statement that while tornadoes wreak a lot of damage across our country; very few usually die from them. Not so anymore.
Hits like this from Mother Nature are getting noticeably worse and more and more frequent. According to Wikipedia, as of May 8th, 819 tornadoes have been reported in the United States (of which at least 465 have been confirmed), with 98 confirmed fatalities. This already makes 2008 the deadliest year for them since 1998, and it’s not Memorial Day yet!
People can pooh pooh extreme weather all they want. I reported a long time ago in one of my blogs that I was curious about reports of global warming relative to increased disastrous weather/climate activity and researched the recorded events myself. This was back in 2000. I went to the NOAA website and printed extreme weather events worldwide from 1990 to 2000. 1990 events took up 1/3 of a page. By 2000, 3 ½ pages printed out for that year.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how fast weather events are advancing. We don’t hear enough about them in the media. We need to see it, and hear it, over and over until we have some notion of what some people are going through because of Mother Nature, not just look out our windows and say “Well, it’s not me.”
Great explanation and map of active fault lines and what causes earthquakes @:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7807001/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornadoes_of_2008