Newsmaker

2010's world gone wild: Quakes, floods, blizzards

(Agencies)
Updated: 2010-12-20 09:46

Here is a quick tour of an anything but normal 2010:

How deadly:

While the Haitian earthquake, Russian heat wave, and Pakistani flooding were the biggest killers, deadly quakes also struck Chile, Turkey, China and Indonesia in one of the most active seismic years in decades. Through mid-December there have been 20 earthquakes of magnitude 7.0 or higher, compared with the normal 16. This year is tied for the most big quakes since 1970, but it is not a record. Nor is it a significantly above average year for the number of strong earthquakes, US earthquake officials say.

Flooding alone this year killed more than 6,300 people in 59 nations through September, according to the World Health Organization. In the United States, 30 people died in floods in the Nashville, Tennessee, region. Inundated countries include China, Italy, India, Colombia and Chad. Super Typhoon Megi, with winds of more than 200 mph devastated the Philippines and parts of China.

Through November 30, nearly 260,000 people died in natural disasters in 2010, compared with 15,000 in 2009, according to Swiss Re. The World Health Organization, which has not updated its figures past September 30, is just shy of 250,000. By comparison, deaths from terrorism from 1968 to 2009 were less than 115,000, according to reports by the US State Department and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The last year in which natural disasters were this deadly was 1983 because of an Ethiopian drought and famine, according to WHO. Swiss Re calls it the deadliest since 1976.

The charity Oxfam says 21,000 of this year's disaster deaths are weather related.

How extreme:

After strong early year blizzards, nicknamed Snowmageddon, paralyzed the US mid-Atlantic and record snowfalls hit Russia and China, the temperature turned to broil.

The year may go down as the hottest on record worldwide or at the very least in the top three, according to the World Meteorological Organization. The average global temperature through the end of October was 58.53 degrees (14.74 Celsius), a shade over the previous record of 2005, according to the National Climatic Data Center.

Los Angeles, California, had its hottest day in recorded history on September 27: 113 degrees. In May, 129 degrees (54 Celsius) set a record for Pakistan and may have been the hottest temperature recorded in an inhabited location.

In the Southeastern United States, the year began with freezes in Florida that had cold-blooded iguanas becoming comatose and falling off trees. Then it became the hottest summer on record for the region. As the year ended, unusually cold weather walion people in the world live in large cities prone to major earthquakes.

A Haitian disaster will happen again, Bilham said: "It could be Algiers. it could be Tehran. It could be any one of a dozen cities."