Its force is ever-humbling
Published 12:01 am Friday, April 29, 2011
Once again, the worst of nature’s fury has unleashed death and destruction, this time across the Deep South.
Once again, the best of humanity’s compassion and generosity is called upon to respond.
A relentless series of powerful tornadoes tore lives and buildings apart across six states Wednesday. By Thursday evening, the death toll had passed 280. Most were killed in Alabama, where monstrous twisters perhaps a mile wide leveled neighborhoods in urban and rural areas alike.
Despite a warning of several minutes provided by modern meteorological technology, these tornadoes were just too massive for many people to escape.
“This was the big one,” James Paul Dice, chief meteorologist at WBRC TV in Birmingham, Ala., told The Washington Post. “A monster of a storm.”
Following so closely on the heels of another unimaginable disaster — last month’s earthquake and tsunami in Japan — one wonders what’s next. Images that used to exist only in Hollywood are now reality, viewable by billions on TV and the Internet.
In this region, of course, we have our own “big one” hanging over us — under us, actually. A 9.0 magnitude earthquake like the one that struck Japan could happen here, any day, any hour. If nothing else, these recent disasters serve as a wake-up call that we ignore at our peril. (For important reminders about how to prepare, go to 3days3ways.org.)
Large-scale disasters have been painfully frequent in recent years — the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, less-destructive but still powerful temblors in Chile and New Zealand, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami in 2004, to name a few. Still, mankind’s capacity for charity comes through again and again.
As of April 12, U.S. donors had given nearly $250 million after the Japanese disaster, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy. A month after the Haiti earthquake, U.S. contributions totaled more than $709 million; a month after Katrina, the total was more than $1.4 billion.
The need in this week’s tornado zones will be enormous. No doubt, Americans will show their humanity again, despite their own current economic challenges.
Here in the Northwest, such giving will be accompanied by the knowledge that one day, disaster footage could be shot here.
As we watch scenes of destruction in Alabama, Japan and elsewhere, we would do well to remember the proverbial saying, “There but for the grace of God, go I.”
