According to tonight's meteorologist on CNN, extreme heat has killed more people than tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, lightening, .... combined in the last ten years in the U.S. Stay cool and hydrated!
Related:
http://www.weather.gov/om/heat/index.shtml
I'm not sure how you can interpret these stats though. Extreme heat usually kills people who are not in good physical health or otherwise weak (little children or senior people), whereas a major earthquake has casualties across the board. So, in a sense, extreme heat should get less of a blame for these deaths.
ReplyDeleteA more meaningful statistic (which is of course practically impossible to compute) for the lives lost by a natural disaster X is the expected total number of years that people who were killed by X would have lived if X didn't happen.
That is an interesting observation. However, some points come to my mind:
ReplyDelete1- The susceptible people you mention are a subset of the general population who are also subject to other disasters that kills even stronger healthy young people. In other words, the people you mention are less likely to survive a flood or hurricane as well than stronger adults: an infant or an old weak and maybe disabled person cannot run away fast enough or survive hunger long enough,...
2- Even if your proposed statistics was to calculate, I would think high life expectancy of the infants who die from heat say in locked cars averages/cancels out with low life expectancy of the older weak people.
3- Another interesting statistic to collect, in addition to life expectancy, is economic status and social class: homeless people are probably the first group affected by winter storms and extreme heat alike.
Welcome to this blog! You are the first person who commented here :-) Thanks.