10 Disasters Waiting To Happen
10.
‘The Big One’
The west coast of America is no stranger to
an earthquake or two.
But while it’s one thing for a little rumble,
and quite a bit worse for a seismic event
to shake a city’s foundations, there’s
something else entirely on the horizon that
could wrought untold destruction: The Big
One.
According to a 2006 paper by Yuri Fialko in
the journal Nature, the San Andreas Fault
line is overdue for a quake of historic proportions.
Literally.
Ruptures have occurred roughly every 150 years
or so over time, with the northern and central
parts of the fault having seen them as recently
as 1857 and 1906.
But it’s been more than 250 years for the
southern portion, so there’s more built
up tension there than a bad marriage.
Predicted at 7.8 magnitude on the Richter
scale, this catastrophically late bloomer
could cause around 2,000 deaths in California
and more than 200 BILLION dollars in damages.
Even worse, recent lower magnitude tremors
in California showed up just how unprepared
the state is for the big one.
The majority of people don’t have emergency
supplies and only around 20% of people are
insured.
In other words, we’ve got the makings of
a real-life Dwayne Johnson movie on our hands,
but the trailer just says “coming soon”.
9.
Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant
Nuclear power is a vital part of modern life
for people all over the world, but it does
come along with a serious, albeit manageable
risk.
That risk has never been more visible than
in Ukraine during the Chernobyl crisis, which
showed the world just how threatening a failure
at a nuclear plant could be.
But less well known is the danger posed by
Armenia’s Metsamor facility.
While not the same model as Chernobyl, Metsamor
actually uses the earliest design of nuclear
plant created in the Soviet Union, and the
only one outside of Russia that’s still
in operation.
But what makes it such a concern is that it
sits in one of the most seismically active
regions on the planet, meaning an overly close
earthquake could lead to a serious failure.
Given it's just 20 miles or 36 kilometres
from the 1 million strong capital of Yerevan,
you can see the risks.
Plans are underway to replace the plant with
a less catastrophically dangerous one, but
it’s the unique position of providing 40%
of the country’s energy.
As such, it can’t be decommissioned until
the replacement’s up and running, whenever
that is.
8.
Dam Collapse
Despite being the crux of at least 40% of
action movie villains’ plans, Dam collapse
isn’t just some fantastical Hollywood catastrophe.
There’s actually a real risk of Dams around
the world failing and leaving thousands of
people at risk.
Right now, the planet is full of dams built
before 1900, which are naturally going to
have lower standards of protection and less
developed technology to do the protecting.
For example, we know that they’re designed
to deal with so-called ‘one-in-one-hundred
year’ flood events.
Well, floods of that level are occurring around
the world roughly every 5 years.
I won’t bore you with why, but let’s just
say it rhymes with… uh, primate strange.
I don’t know, moving on.
Globally, there have been 40 dam collapses
since the year 2000, which have caused hundreds
of deaths.
Most recently in 2019, the British town of
Whaley Bridge had to be evacuated after flooding
led to what the Environment Agency called
“real risk of collapse”.
With flooding events already happening four
times more often than in 1980, that risk is
only going to keep mounting, as will its potential
death toll.
7.
Global Disease Epidemic
In case you hadn’t noticed, human beings
are pretty fragile.
All kinds of things can wind up killing us,
from a stubbed toe to a common cold.
And on a not unrelated note, the world is
actually surprisingly vulnerable devastation
at the hands of disease.
According to Boston University professor Jonathan
Quick, an airborne disease could reach 25,000
people in one week, 700,000 in a month, and
300 million people over 6 months in EVERY
urban centre.
Tech-pioneer turned uber-charity man Bill
Gates estimates the likelihood of a “catastrophic
epidemic” inside his lifetime, so probably
over the next 30 years, at more than 50%.
According to Quick, this is more likely than
it should be, mostly because of fear, complacency
and financial self-interest.
For example, there are more immediately useful
ways to spend government money than on preparing
for a plague that may or may not happen, even
though that makes the ‘may’ a lot more
likely, and that’s especially true because
the poor are the most likely victims but likely
can’t afford immunisation.
I guess all I could suggest is becoming a
hermit?
At least that gives you time to watch the
Alltime10s back catalogue.
6.
Tower Block Collapse
It’s pretty fair to say that construction
methods have gotten more advanced over the
years.
But that does mean that there are some pretty
dangerous skeletons in the architectural closet
dating back a few decades.
Take the UK for example.
After the tower block safety made the headlines
due to a number of deaths in 2017, an independent
audit found that nearly 600 high-rise buildings
containing as many as 41,000 apartments were,
and still are at risk of structural failure.
That’s because of a flawed construction
method employed in the 1960s and 70s called
the “large panel system”, which have now
degraded to the point where residents can
fit their entire arms through cracks in the
walls.
If one of these apartments was to experience
a fire or gas explosion, there’s a high
likelihood that it would collapse the ENTIRE
building.
That already happened in 1968, when a gas
explosion cascaded to destroy the whole south-east
corner of a tower block.
This is in the 5th largest economy in the
world by the way, and there are tens of thousands
of apartments just one fire away from dropping
to the ground.
Just imagine how bad it could be elsewhere.
5.
Demographic Time Bomb
So I’ve got some good news and some bad
news for you.
The good news is that people around the world
are living longer than ever.
The bad news is that less and less people
are having kids.
This trend is generally called the “demographic
time bomb” since eventually, many developed
countries are going to reach a point where
there simply aren’t enough able-bodied people
to take care of the old and infirm.
That means lots of older people dying before
their time.
Japan is the headline example, with both a
skyrocketing average age AND a plummeting
population.
In the year 2000, 1.5% of the country was
over 85.
By 2070 that’s going to reach around 9%
or roughly 8.1 million people.
That’s true of the US too, whose birth rate
has dropped from 2.12 to 1.76 in the last
decade, and the average birthing age in some
parts of the country is as high as 32.
Or take Finland, where there are actually
more births than deaths annually, and the
gap is widening each year.
So we better get working on those AI carers,
so long as it doesn’t get all I, Robot.
4.
Global Recession
Ah, who can forget 2008?
Katy Perry broke her way into pop culture,
shutter shades blighted faces across the land…
oh, and the world suffered most crippling
financial collapse in 8 decades.
That crash made living conditions considerably
worse worldwide, and led to millions of deaths
due to starvation, healthcare cuts and suicides.
And now, there are widespread predictions
among economists that 2020 could see ANOTHER
financial crisis.
At least there’s still Katy Perry.
That’s largely on the back of the ongoing
trade war between the US and China, which
is making stock markets seriously worried.
On top of that, if the signs of war between
the US and Iran actually come to fruition,
the resulting oil price shock could be the
uppercut that sees the US economy down for
the count.
There’s also the real risk that China bursts
its own bubble, since, according to economist
Grace Blakely, Xi Jinping has essentially
traded unstable growth for a temporarily satisfied
middle class.
With that in mind, if the two biggest economies
in the world dip, you can bet that it’s
going to have ripple effects for all of us.
Best start stocking up on canned goods, you’ll
need ‘em.
3.
Bridge Collapse
You might have noticed that a lot of the things
we use every single day in public life are
pretty worse for wear.
That means that we’re living pretty precarious
day-to-day lives when it comes to ports, railways,
airports, dams - as we’ve already seen - and,
in this case, bridges.
In recent years, the world has seen several
high profile cases of dangerous bridges unexpectedly
caving, most notably the Genoa collapse in
2017 which killed 42 people.
While that could be dismissed as a fluke,
the evidence suggests it’s just part of
a trend that could end in tears.
For example, the US has more than 54,000 bridges
deemed ‘structurally deficient’.
That’s 9% of all bridges in the country,
and it would take 37 years to fix or replace
them all at the current rate.
And what’s worse, 2017 research from Stanford
University found that methods for assessing
flood risk on bridges actually underestimate
the risk.
So basically, there are loads of dodgy bridges
and they’re probably EVEN less safe than
we think.
Maybe don’t think about that on your way
home.
2.
Catastrophic Cyber Attack
In the modern-day, warfare has evolved to
the point where physical assaults are just
one part of a complex web of tactics, which
includes cyberspace.
As such, the use of hacking, DDOS attacks
and cyber-espionage is only going to become
a more pressing threat over time.
According to the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence, that’s becoming particularly
pressing for the US, since Russia and China
are developing capacities for some serious
attacks.
The 2019 report claims that “Moscow is now
staging cyber-attack assets to allow it to
disrupt or damage US civilian and military
infrastructure during a crisis,” which it
has already shown it has the capability for
after doing just that to Ukraine in 2015.
Beyond that, we saw the 2017 North Korean-backed
Wannacry malware wreak havoc on windows systems
worldwide, including large parts of the UK’s
NHS computer system.
And outside of national security, the World
Economic Forum has stated that cyber-attacks
are THE biggest risk to businesses around
the world.
So whether its nation-states, organised crime
or lone wolves, there’s a looming, potentially
massive threat that can’t quite be pinned
down.
1.
EMP Attack
In the halcyon days of the Cold War, the prospect
of nuclear annihilation was pretty much ever-present
in the lives of Americans.
But fast forward to the current day and there’s
a different, though not unrelated threat to
worry about.
I’m talking about EMP, or electro-magnetic
pulses, in other words, a burst of electromagnetic
energy that’s capable of crippling power
grids and national infrastructures, especially
if weaponised.
And unlike nukes, which we spend a lot of
time and resources preparing for, EMP attacks
are a serious blind spot.
In a 2008 EMP Commission report outlining
the severity of the threat, there were more
than 100 recommendations made to Congress
over how to shore up things like electricity
services.
Without those measures, committee chairman
William R. Graham says an EMP would be a “civilisation
killer.”
And guess how many were implemented by 2015…
zero.
Yep, as a result, a SECOND commission had
to be created to approach an even more pressing
threat unprepared.
For example, the US military now has to deal
with a North Korean EMP threat, which is about
the last place you would want it to come from.
