On this day, exactly ten years ago, the Kashmir earthquake occurred. It killed over 86,000 people — and displaced almost three million. Its aftershocks were substantial all by themselves. One of was 6.4 magnitude — not that much less powerful than the most powerful earthquake I’ve ever experienced, the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. And compared to most people, I’m laxidasical about earthquakes. I’m sure I would have terrified living through this quake — if I did manage to do so.
The earthquake had a magnitude of 7.6. It was felt as far away as Afghanistan and China. More than 70% of the casualties were in the city of Muzaffarabad. That’s remarkable when you consider that the current population of the city is slightly less than 100,000. Smaller towns were apparently reduced to rubble. It’s hard to imagine. And the infrastructure in the area was not up to the task of rescue. Communication was virtually cut off. But in the end, over $5 billion in relief did make it to the area. And life continues on.
Afterword
Here’s one for James Fillmore: in 1956, Don Larsen pitched the only perfect game in a World Series in MLB history. Is that because there just haven’t been that many World Series games, or because of something about the competition in the World Series? That sounds like a good subject for an article. Unfortunately, Larsen never played for the Twins — or even the Senators.
I actually hate writing about sports, but I’ll throw the question out to others who dig this stuff.
Then I realized it was a terrible question to ask on a sports site, so I deleted it. I can only pass myself off as a Guy’s Guy with pure deception. Manly men know all about Larsen, and Internet Manly Men know exactly what his game Meant In The Big Picture.
I’m fairly sure Larsen had a great day. And that happens in baseball; people have great days pitching and hitting. What’s crazy is how invested fans become about predicting future performance from players having great or rotten days. Like making correct predictions, which is almost impossible, might get you hired by the team to run things, which is definitely impossible.
Yeah, I think of it all as stochastic. I hate to hear people talk about streaks and so on. That just doesn’t seem to be the way it works.
I’m not sure I got the full context, but the total number of perfect games in Major League history remains pretty low – under 30 I think. With one perfect game in the 1956 World Series, the proportion of perfect W.S. games is very much higher than the proportion in general.
When you put it that way, his perfect game would appear to be an outlier. That might make a good post. I love doing basic statistics articles.
Life does continue on-not necessarily as great as it was before but still on. Apparently they had housing back up for nearly everyone within two years after the quake. What kind of housing is kind of unclear but at least they had a roof over their head. I could read some of the recovery reports but I am too cheap to pay for it.
No doubt a lot of aid did finally make it there, so I’m not surprised.
The gist I got was that it was not as bad as it is usually for these kinds of things-where most of the money/resources is diverted into a few rich people with guns hands since there were already so many NGOs in the area.
Interesting. It could have been the scale of it. Two million displaced. I can’t really imagine it.